VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

The desert sits in our imagination as an uninhabitable plane of scarcity and abandonment. We project upon its abstractions of survival and ingenuity. The desert has been home to central Iran’s civilizations for thousands of years, and yet, the human ingenuity that has allowed habitation not only to exist but to thrive is at risk of being lost. One milestone of infrastructural engineering worthy of re-examination is the qanat. This system of sloping channels that extract groundwater from aquifers in precipitation-rich mountain regions and transport it to the desert plains for drinking and agricultural uses is the unseen technological innovation that has been honed over generations, and many locations. The desert dwellers in the Lut Region of Iran1, through a deep understanding of their immediate surroundings, designed this mechanism for extracting water. Perhaps it is the first cross-disciplinary effort in problem-solving. The qanat system depends on expertise in hydrology, geometry, geotechnics, biology, and economics. It also required facility in community organizing. Interestingly, the qanat’s conceptual ideas, building techniques, and social constructs have evolved very little since its early beginnings. The lessons gleaned from the qanat’s transformative impact in the Lut Region have great relevance today. As society tries to better understand our tenuous relationship to its environment, the qanat serves as a project whose vast scale is extremely rare. These life-giving underground networks require insight and examination that transcends any one artifact, building, or physical site to recognize a broader conceptual space of survival, habitation, and prosperity. 1- The Lut Desert, widely referred to as Dasht-e Lut, is a large salt desert located in the provinces of Kerman and Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran. It is the world’s 33rd-largest desert, and was included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List on July 17, 2016.