GLENN LOWRY: Artist, Andrea Zittel.
ANDREA ZITTEL: When I was born, there was only one other house for miles around and then by the time I was in high school, it was a completely developed suburbia. I just felt like human development was taking over everything.
GLENN LOWRY: Since 2000, Zittel has lived on a 25-acre rural land parcel in the California desert.
ANDREA ZITTEL: When I moved to the desert, I became really interested in these politicized spaces of the American West and started thinking about land division, including the idea of the Jeffersonian grid, which is how our entire country was divided into a whole system of one square mile grids, so that land could be distributed from one centralized location in the East Coast.
GLENN LOWRY: Zittel designed Wall Sprawl (Next To Las Vegas Bay) using satellite photographs of an industrial complex on the edge of Las Vegas.
ANDREA ZITTEL: You can see a planned community going in next to raw desert land and then there’s this area that they’re mining right next to that. So you have these three really different kinds of space all joining up together. What I do is take a section and then repeat it so that they become like a giant sprawl. When you look at this particular one, it looks kind of insect-like or virus-like.