Contractors at the Salvaged Materials Market ignored the stack of misshapen supplies, but Carmelo saw the makings of his masterpiece in that pile. The sculptor spent an hour scrounging to gather all he needed, then pushed his cart of discarded treasures out the door.
Every footstep fed his mind as they led to a four-story makerspace graffitied in the mismatched styles of his community’s cultures. Carmelo floated to his curtained-off corner, spilled his haul, and began to pick and place parts on his piece-in-progress in a dance that brought his dream from the dark of mind into the studio light.
— a drabble by Syris Valentine
The spotlightWe tend to think of buildings as semipermanent structures. Once they go up, decades or even centuries pass before they come down. But when they do, it’s usually under the weight of wrecking balls and sledgehammers. The shattered remains of the structures that once sheltered us are then often cast into a landfill. Each year, nearly 150 million tons of this debris piles up in dumps in the U.S. alone.
Globally, the act of erecting ... Read more
