The West After Water: Fifteenth International Conference on the Constructed Environment

The West After Water:
Extractions, Frictions, and Power in the Desert Southwest.

The following study provides a critical inquiry into the infrastructures of extraction, transmission, and accumulation that enable American-style urbanism to develop in arid regions.

Focusing on the exploitation of water in the Colorado River system, the study begins with an assessment of the region’s dominant development framework, followed by an exercise to analyze + model the visible and invisible consequences of this extraction, and finally speculates on alternative development frameworks, investigating the issue of mass water extraction through the lens of the water itself - a submerged perspective.