JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK DESIGN GUIDELINES

Be nimble, cooperative, porous, reactive, resilient, and efficient. The Joshua Tree National Park Design Guidelines were determined with the help of projects like this 2014 nomadic camp proposal, the Granite Caravan. The Caravan's precast elements wander about the desert landscape atop a network of stilts, deploying and retracting in response to environmental and programmatic demands. The project introduces the use of eutectic salts (phase change materials) to offset the extreme shifts of Joshua Tree National Park's desert temperature. This ensures the stability of local ecologies by removing itself from the groundscape, withdrawing to nearly half of its size when not in use.

The Joshua Tree National Park Design Guidelines were spearheaded by Professor Doug Noble, at USC, with the help of National Park Service Rangers at Joshua Tree National Park and the Precast Concrete Foundation.