Desert Anxieties. The Algerian Sahara: Emptiness by Design Part 2 Dissertation 2024 Ferial Massoud Architectural Association London | UK On an evening of October 1882, Francois Roudaire stood up at the National Assembly in Paris to present his project for a sea in the Algerian Sahara.Roudaire’s project was never realised, yet by proposing to drown the Sahara in Mediterranean waters, lining it in concrete, and propounding an agrarian paradise, he was in fact drawing the outlines of the image of the desert, of emptiness waiting to be filled.By exhuming this anecdote of colonial geo-engineering, the paper explores the spatial consequences of this imagined void. It argues that to draw a sea in the desert was to prompta legal transformation: as a sea, the desert was unfixable and therefore beyond the boundaries of the law: a legal exception.History would confirm this. More than fifty years after Roudaire stood at his pulpit, in what was now a lawless desert-ocean, the French would test no less than seventeen nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara, politely tucked away behind the line of the law.The episode of French nuclear experiments is one of many material tracings, testing Roudaire’s sea against its consequences. But it also confirms that the project of creating emptiness was realised, imposing invisibility to justify violence. Ferial Massoud Tutor(s) Mercedes Rodrigo GarcíA