In June 1947, Harold Corsini, a twenty-eight-year-old photographer from the public relations division of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (SONJ), made his way to four sites on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia to document the modern materials and methods of labor, housing, and education that oil corporations had brought to the region. 1 Corsini was one of over thirty photographers hired for an initiative known as the Standard Oil Photography Project, which, under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, accumulated approximately eighty thousand pictures between 1943 and 1956. As a former economics professor who had previously served as the director of the Farm Security Administration’s documentary photography program, Stryker had helped shape the image of rural poverty during the Great Depression. Now he brought the documentary genre’s didactic capacity to bear on his new position at Standard Oil, developing a new kind of PR image—the “industrial photograph” 2—for the express purpose of telling a holistic story about oil. Approximately 3 percent of these photographs were reproduced in educational materials and in popular magazines like Fortune, Time, Life, and Vogue. Some were destroyed by Stryker. The rest were submerged in archival collections, to await serendipitous rediscovery.

In a cracked leather binder retrieved from Stryker’s collected papers at the University of Louisville, Corsini’s photographs, almost two hundred in total, have been reorganized thematically into thirteen subfolders. 3 Each photograph is accompanied by a number identifying the negative, the date, the photographer, the location, and a brief descriptive caption. Cataloged under “Dhahran General Views,” no. 57866 is an aerial perspective of a housing settlement under construction on the Dammam Dome in the coastal province of Al Hasa. 4 In the foreground, laid out in a rational grid, like the plan of a barracks, are groups of barastis—single-room dwellings constructed from the intensive use of a single material, the date palm frond. In the background, a very different set of planning principles are at play. Receding into the distance is what appears, at first glance, to be a sort of facsimile of a California suburb—a dense plan of ranch homes lining curvilinear streets. A wide expanse of desert, sliced by a highway leading out of the frame, toward the Persian Gulf, separates the two orders.

The divergent realisms that we see in the photograph appear to be responses to the contingencies of their context. When the Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) entered Saudi Arabia in 1933, following its oil concession agreement with the new Saudi king, its first resident employees were a group of geologists living in air-conditioned, two-room trailers imported from San Francisco. 5 It was only when the “company wives” began arriving in 1937 that the meager accommodations on offer were expanded into cottages. 6 Another two years passed before commercially viable quantities of oil were discovered, and the planning of an industrial, administrative, and residential infrastructure to support the company’s activities in the desert commenced. 7 The ad hoc, nineteenth-century oil towns of the American West provided one template for development. But once the PR imperative became clear—of both attracting and keeping a large American workforce, as well as representing its operations to audiences back home—building a ready-made, middle-class retreat in barren Dhahran seemed, to the company, entirely reasonable. The company used PR for an entirely different objective when it came to its Saudi workforce: namely, signifying the continuity of Al Hasa building traditions and lifestyles. 8

The binary world captured in no. 57866 stages two possible intersections with architecture. The first, proceeding from the company and photographer’s point of view, presents architecture and urban planning as a medium of midcentury PR practices in the United States. It understands the Dhahran housing camp as a world set up for a picture, in which the jarring proximity of the barastis to middle-class suburbia produces a set of temporal, material, geographic, and cultural antinomies. 9 To the historian working at this intersection, the photographs are an object of critique. They depict an oil corporation’s anachronistic narrative of progress: a linear, developmental history of dwelling that showcases first a “primitive” form, then a “modern” one. The second intersection, projecting the point of view of design, understands architecture as the trace of nature transformed by human motive. Here, privileging the barasti as architecture and treating the suburban house as mere reproduction evokes architecture’s long tradition of returning to “first principles” as a way to reform itself. To the genealogist, then, the photographs are an opportunity. Their content slips easily between past and future time.

Staging the Modern, Staging the Primitive

Traveling in the Mojave Desert in 1982, the critic Reyner Banham once encountered Kelso Depot, a modest building in the midst of the dunes. Feeling ecstatic, he attributed the pleasure of seeing surroundings that he would ordinarily consider banal (“mowed lawns,” “well-trimmed hedges,” a “Spanish Colonial station building with Mission Revival gables, tiled roof, a surrounding arcade”) to their symbolic function as markers of home comforts. “Far from promising fantastic or exotic delights,” he wrote, “these gables and arcades probably promised no more than a reassuringly reliable and surprise-free experience to the traveler, much as does the (equally fantasticated) sign on a Holiday Inn of today.” 10 Overlaying the cultural markers of the American middle class onto Dhahran had a similar effect: they soothed the representational anxieties of the newly arrived oil executive’s family, enabling them to embrace their PR-mandated role of humanizing the company’s operations and to enact scenes of “modern” domesticity in a context devoid of them. 11

In no. 58283 (“American Housing”), photographed at eye level, E. C. Singelyn, the head of accounting, observes intently as his wife and daughter play in their lushly landscaped front yard, which is enclosed by a light, woven picket-style fence. Singelyn’s home is an apt choice of photographic subject, for the housing camp is largely a feat of accounting—subdivided blocks of similar residential types (executive, couples, singles) are distributed to employees on the basis of points corresponding to their length of service and job title. The residents’ standings in the company hierarchy further register in plan, with executives’ and couples’ addresses placed centrally along the major landscaped axis, and singles’ homes located peripherally. The petroleum-dependent infrastructure that this plan generates, only a short distance from the site of its extraction, figures the total diagram of oil as it flows from derrick to asphalt. 12

Where manicured lawns, curvilinear streets, and traffic circles produce the image of a suburban lifestyle ideal to the west, the company’s use of a rational grid to the east to discipline desert topography and Arab workers alike has very different image effects. No. 57955 (“Arab Housing”) depicts rows of identical, equidistant, palm-frond shelters with pitched roofs, set against an unadorned desert landscape. Here, the grid functions to fix a nomadic or “untraceable” population in place, a first step towards the promise of subjecthood. 13 Imposing the value of measurement onto the landscape fulfilled not only a PR but an HR objective, as terms like “fired” (mufannash) and “time off without pay” (dan) began to circulate for the first time in the Al Hasa lexicon. A special labor relations report issued by the company in 1958 suggests that its disciplinary techniques were indeed a little too effective. “Everything connected with the first al-Barasamah [the Arab Personnel Bureau] in the Saudi mind,” the author notes ruefully, “has to do with treating masses of Company employees as impersonal, anonymous, face-less numbers.” 14

Qualities of fixity and itinerancy, indicated by addresses or the lack thereof, are doubly represented in the material choices of each dwelling type. The construction of the American home, as seen in no. 48727 (“American Housing”), is the construction of a fixed asset. Materials are selected for their durability—brick, timber, cement—and procured internationally. In fact, the only local elements in the supply chain are the rocks that have been dredged from the shoreline for use in the foundation. The structure performs its firmness as a type of rootedness for its expatriate inhabitants. By contrast, the barasti is a lightweight, temporary-use structure fashioned entirely from materials that are proximate and literally rooted—namely, date palm and mangrove trees. In no. 59086 (“Arab Housing Construction Materials”), piles of palm fronds in the foreground await the process of being cut, soaked, and stripped by hand. These form the ribs of the dwelling under construction in the background, where local workers expertly knot them together using ropes of palm tree fiber. The barasti inverts both the semiotics and the logistics of construction that produce the company home.

In his 2002 book Time and the Other, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the concept “temporal distancing” to critique a mode of fieldwork that claims objectivity by assigning “a different Time” to its object of study. 15 Corsini’s etic perspective of the barasti as a nearly technology-free, labor-intensive, handmade architectural object—in conjunction with an emic view of the standardized, comfort-oriented suburban lifestyle—imposes a similarly allochronic reading onto the Dhahran Camp. The barastis appear regressed in time, childlike bricolages supported by columns that are still very nearly trees. Consequently, the effect of juxtaposing the “primitive” barastis and the “modern” ranch homes is to validate the desirability of the latter. 16

What’s Primitive, What’s Modern?

First Eden, then Babel. Before architecture’s preoccupation with cultural and linguistic difference, it was obsessed with origin myths and ideal prototypes, for it was Vitruvius himself who first talked about the birds and the bees.17 Architecture’s origins did not lie in our simple imitation of nature’s structures, he surmised, but in our iterative perfection of them through discourse. Vitruvius’s rustic-rational construction authorized the imaginings of countless others, from the good abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier to G. B. Piranesi, Quatremère de Quincy, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and Jean-François Blondel, all of whom used it at various moments to reform the discipline. 18 But it was Gottfried Semper who—upon encountering the model of the Caribbean Hut in the “colonial section” of the Great Exhibition of 1851—gave the primeval dwelling of Vitruvius a decisive material, conceptual, and even linguistic swerve. 19 Semper argued that the Caribbean Hut’s woven walls proved that architecture’s beginnings lay in the craft of textiles. In positing a utilitarian “theory of dressing” (Bekleidungstheorie) at the heart of architectural history, he not only relocated the roots of Greek classicism to the Near and Far East, but he also suggested that the combinations in which his four universal elements of architecture (hearth, wall, roof, and foundation) were arranged varied according to the “influences of climate, natural surroundings, social relations, and racial dispositions.” 20

In the case of the barasti and its hot desert context, architecture begins with the act of elevating and cooling the ground. Mats (hassir) woven from stripped palm leaves can, for this purpose, line the ground or be rolled up and transported elsewhere with ease. A second and equally momentous advance lies in the production of shade. Once a trunk-and-rib frame structure has been erected to support them, the palm leaf mats are layered to form a roof cover (areesh). 21 The coverage that is provided to inhabitants in the interior is doubled by a flat canopy on the exterior. A third motive is to enclose for protection and privacy. As seen in no. 48682, the frond-ribs support a thin layer of shredded leaf on the inside that is permeable enough to preclude the need for a window. By allowing for optimal wind penetration, this carpet-style wall controls for overall thermal mass. Furthermore, it can be reinforced (by mud or gypsum) or eliminated as needed, without compromising the overall structure. The movable mat-ground, the seamed double-roof, and the permeable carpet-wall offer possible future points of departure for design.

When modern architecture’s identity became synonymous with various modes of modular, industrial production, including the air-conditioned glass box, it presented unsustainable challenges in the context of desert urbanism. 22 The Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif’s 1984 novel, Cities of Salt, set in a fictional oil town named Harran on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, is scathing on this point. Like Dhahran in 1947, Munif’s town encompasses, none too subtly, an Arab Harran and an American Harran. He writes that by the time the oil company has remade the Edenic oasis it first encountered in its own corporate and consumerist image, “Harran was no one’s property, no one’s city. So chaotic and crowded had it become that everyone asked, and everyone answered, but no one heard or understood.” 23 Munif’s critique of Harran as a Babylonian “city of salt” that cannot sustain itself certainly resonates strongly in an era of climate crises and a desired reduction in reliance on fossil fuels. But it is the inability of development-driven modern architecture to evolve in relation to its society and environment that gets to the heart of Munif’s diagnosis. The cause of the confusion, in other words, is the new lack of coherence between the social, the technological, and the environmental introduced by the company.

If the dwelling based on the craft of textiles is too utilitarian to engender self-reflexive thought, and the dwelling based on engineering is too alienated to evolve, a third mode of construction that synthesizes the social aspect of the former with the training inherent in the latter is needed. 24 In response to the demand for a revisioned urbanism that is coherent, egalitarian with technology, and “closer” to the natural world, Corsini’s photographs gain renewed significance. 25 Now the “primitive” is a counterpoint for the “shortcomings of advanced technological culture”; its “principal purpose” is to “renew” architecture. 26 Invalidating the “modern,” it no longer represents a chronological regression, but rather becomes evidence of progressive, environmentally conscious thought.


The Genealogist was played by Zehra Ahmed in Flat Out 4 (Spring 2020).