The Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar landscape on Earth, provides an unparalleled setting for examining how landscape architecture can contribute to addressing intensifying climatic pressures. As an environment characterized by the almost absolute absence of water, constant solar radiation, and geomorphologies shaped over extraordinarily slow stretches of time, it offers a revealing stage from which to examine how landscapes evolve when climatic, geological, and hydrological forces act with little human interference. Yet, as in most regions on Earth, centuries of settlement and extractive practices have inscribed a new set of layers of order: agricultural, infrastructural, and cultural practices that not only inhabit the desert but also transform it. Working in and around the Reserva Puribeter in San Pedro de Atacama–an active site where scientific research, conservation, and centuries-old Likanantay knowledge systems intersect–the studio focuses on landscape conditions where scarcity becomes a generative principle. We will look at Atacama as an environment that embodies an intelligence of scarcity–one where the absence of water becomes the impetus of landscape form, and where human intervention amplifies ecological richness.

This perspective will draw from research on oasis systems worldwide, and how the simple reconfiguration of topographic, hydrologic, and ecological conditions yields positive feedback loops of unexpected fertility: depressions that gather moisture through gravity alone; shallow excavations that expose the water table; terraces that preserve soil; vegetation that modulates heat; and irrigation systems that stabilize water regimes. The goal is to explore how geomorphological constraints and human practices can converge to produce enduring agricultural patterns in conditions of extreme aridity, and how these systems might inform adaptive design.

At its core, the studio explores questions that tie together contemporary science and local forms of knowledge: How might landscape design contribute to hydrological resilience in hyper-arid regions increasingly stressed by climate change? What ecological and agricultural techniques might emerge in places shaped by intense scarcity, and what is their role today? In the face of intensifying tourism and environmental pressure, how might forms of land knowledge developed in extreme aridity–both locally and comparatively in other regions of the world–contribute to curating evolutionary paths for the landscapes of Atacama that are ecologically healthy, economically viable, and culturally relevant?

The studio will begin by collectively producing an atlas of ecological and agricultural techniques developed across extremely arid environments worldwide. This catalog will serve as a comparative framework for understanding Atacama as part of a broader family of hyper-arid ecologies shaped by both human and natural adaptations. Readings, films, and scientific documentation will accompany this work. 

A trip to Atacama will immerse students in the local material, cultural, and institutional realities. We will meet with Likanantay communities, local water authorities, scientists, conservation practitioners, and territorial organizations. Fieldwork will include participatory mapping, the study of hydrological and geomorphological processes, documentation of agroecological practices, and situated experiments that test how design might intervene in these delicate environments.

Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of how scarcity generates its own forms of intelligence–biological, ecological, cultural–and how landscape architecture can engage extreme environments with rigor, respect, and imagination.