03 · Mojave Desert, NV / CAARID LOGICS
Dust filtration devices for the Mojave, assembled from what the surrounding towns already make.
SITE
Mojave Desert, NV / CA
Program
Dust filtration, lookout
Medium
Wind analysis, exploded object
Reading
Prevailing wind as plan
01 Research
Wind arrives on a small number of consistent bearings, and those bearings point at the towns.
Recorded wind data for the region resolves into a rose with distinct lobes rather than an even spread. The strongest lobes align with the corridors running toward Las Vegas, Henderson and Boulder City.
That means dust is not ambient. It travels on known lines, and anything intended to catch it can be oriented rather than sealed.
The study covers a second basin to the southwest. Around the Salton Sea the dust has a different origin: chemical runoff from the Imperial Valley drives algae decay, and the exposed lakebed sends it into the settlements on the shore. Bombay Beach has lost population since 1972 to the air and the smell.
Wind rose — lobes aligned to the regional corridors.
Earlier analysis of the same field.
Salton Sea — Mecca, Salton Beach, Salton City and Bombay Beach against the runoff that drives the decline.
02 Observation
Each town in the region retains exactly one capability, and none of them retains all of them.
Las Vegas holds the power grid. Henderson fabricates metal. Boulder City builds. Goodsprings and Searchlight are mining towns, one historical, one still working copper. Nipton and Mojave City sit on the infrastructure between them, and the National Reserve is preserved.
No single town can produce a finished device. The region collectively can, which makes the supply chain itself the design constraint.
03 Translation
The device is broken into parts, and each part is assigned to the town that can already make it.
Hopper tube, dust hopper, air passage, grill, outer scale, inner mesh scale and tensioner: seven components, drawn exploded so the joints between them are explicit.
Each is tied by line to its source town. The drawing is simultaneously an assembly diagram and a map of who builds what, so the object cannot be read apart from the region that produces it.
Side elevation — flotation, deck, canopy, planting.
04 Architecture
A mesh canopy pitched against the slope beside an existing fire lookout, assembled on site by one technician.
The finished device is light enough to be raised without machinery. Its scales are tensioned across a curved frame and set at the angle the wind rose established.
It shares its ground with what was already there: the lookout tower, the truck, the tool chests. The architecture is an addition to a working landscape rather than a replacement for it.
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