A desert architecture book for cooler days

This one belongs less to the coffee table than the travel wish list. In Desert Dreaming: Design in the Southwest and Beyond, writer Jessica Ritz looks at residential architecture across North America’s desert landscapes, moving through the Chihuahuan, Mojave, Sonoran and Great Basin regions. The thread is how people build in places shaped by heat, aridity and constraint, from desert modernism to older adobe and earth-building traditions.

From the sound of it, the interest is in the range rather than a single style. Ritz sets Indigenous building traditions alongside settlers, transplants and later experiments, asking what happens when architecture meets a place that does not bend easily. Featured projects include DUST’s Sombra de Santa Fe in New Mexico, OPA’s Shapeshifter House in Nevada and an austere Arizona home by A-I-R. As Ritz writes in the book, nature remains the clearest teacher here.

There is nothing to book, of course: this is a book, published by Gibbs Smith, rather than an exhibition or house opening. But for anyone who likes architecture tied closely to climate, materials and terrain, it sounds like a useful companion — and a good way to build a list of desert houses worth reading up on next.

Our summary of a story from Wallpaper*, published 4 October 2026. Read the original

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