The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles

(Paperback)

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Description

Once the third largest lake in California, and among the world's greatest air pollution offenders, the deadened Owens Lake was for decades merely a catastrophic footnote to the most notorious water grab in modern history. Now, the lake has been re-assembled to exceed the value of what was lost - without refilling its shores and depriving Los Angeles of its water supply. In Spoils of Dust the lake's peculiar redemption is the backdrop for investigating contemporary relationships between landscape design, control, and perception. The lake-like terrain is the most intimate display of modern technocratic vision and exposes the limits of invention and control of infrastructural ecologies. Whether by observations of dust or scenery, it is as much the product of how we perceive and value landscape today. Answering its analysis, the book concludes with a visual atlas and proposal to induce more imaginative outcomes and perceptions.

Reviews

"Outside of California's water experts, few know where Los Angeles's famous water grab came from or the social and environmental impacts that resulted. Alexander Robinson has written a thorough account of Owens Lake, which was once California's third-largest water body. The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles reads like a whodunit told by an omniscient narrator (Robinson himself, as a small-town detective), featuring the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District (GBUAPCD) and an unwitting protagonist, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). It is a compelling environmental saga that combines site analysis with a discussion of design process in the complex environmental and legal landscape that shapes Owens Lake today." --Journal of Architectural Education
"Unlike moralizing contributions to the long Progressive Era's anti-urbanist tradition, 2018's The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake That Made Los Angeles establishes not only a case for reparation but also a path toward achieving just that. According to USC landscape architecture and urbanism professor Alexander Robinson, design allows for reinvention as restitution." -- Peter Sebastian Chesney (LA Review of Books)
"At times, The Spoils of Dust is a dense read. But its gorgeous maps, graphs and photographs celebrate a landscape that others might dismiss as post-apocalyptic. Robinson makes a convincing case that massive human developments need not always result in decimation." --Nature: International Journal of Science

Author Bio

Alexander Robinson is a landscape architect, author, and assistant professor at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of the book Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture and a winner of the prestigious Rome Prize.