NEW YORK—Passersby stop and gaze at the thought-provoking scene before them— a series of asphalt-shingled rooftops sticking out of the ground.
“I thought it would be a house under the dirt,” said Mark Almodover of Brooklyn.
The builders did not forget to include walls and floors at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 46th Street in Times Square.
They just did what the architect, David Brooks, told them to.
Brooks is a visual artist who created this 5,000-square-foot sculpture in order to inform the public about desertification, a word he says encompasses the negative effects of urban sprawl, industrial agriculture, and the under-utilization of abandoned buildings.
“Abandoned buildings and yet a housing crisis at the same time is kind of insane,” said Brooks in a phone interview from Miami, where he is preparing for a two-day Everglades camping trip.
Brooks spends time out in the field with conservation biologists in places like the Everglades and the Amazon. He notices sprawl combined with overpopulation and housing fluctuation, the “speed and scale,” of which “keeps increasing.”
