An architect's subversive reimagining of the US-Mexico border wall

Isn't it fascinating how the simple act
of drawing a line on the map

can transform the way we see
and experience the world?

And how those spaces
in between lines, borders,

become places.

They become places where
language and food and music

and people of different cultures
rub up against each other

in beautiful and sometimes violent
and occasionally really ridiculous ways.

And those lines drawn on a map

can actually create
scars in the landscape,

and they can create scars in our memories.

My interest in borders came about
when I was searching for an architecture

of the borderlands.

And I was working on several projects
along the US-Mexico border

designing buildings made out of mud
taken right from the ground.

And I also work on projects that you
might say immigrated to this landscape.

Prada Marfa, a land art sculpture

that crosses the border between
art and architecture,

and it demonstrated
to me that architecture

could communicate ideas that are much more
politically and culturally complex,

that architecture could be satirical
and serious at the same time

and it could speak to the disparities
between wealth and poverty

and what's local and what's foreign.

And so in my search for
an architecture of the borderlands,

I began to wonder,

is the wall architecture?

I began to document my thoughts

and visits to the wall

by creating a series of souvenirs

to remind us of the time
when we built a wall

and what a crazy idea that was.

I created border games (Laughter),

postcards,

snow globes with little architectural
models inside of them,

and maps that told the story
of resilience at the wall

and sought for ways that design
could bring to light the problems

that the border wall was creating.

So, is the wall architecture?

Well, it certainly is a design structure,

and it's designed at
a research facility called FenceLab,

where they would load vehicles
with 10,000 pounds

and ram them into the wall
at 40 miles an hour

to test the wall's impermeability.

But there was also counter-research
going on on the other side,

the design of portable drawbridges

that you could bring right up to the wall

and allow vehicles to drive right over.

(Laughter)

And like with all research projects,

there are success

and there are failures.

But it's this medieval
reactions to the wall --

drawbridges, for example --

that are because the wall itself is
an arcane, medieval form of architecture.

It's an overly simplistic response
to a complex set of issues,

and a number of medieval technologies
have sprung up along the wall:

catapults that launch
bales of marijuana over the wall

or cannons that shoot packets
of cocaine and heroin over the wall.

Now during medieval times,

diseased, dead bodies

were sometimes catapulted over walls
as an early form of biological warfare,

and it's speculated that today,

humans are being propelled over the wall

as a form of immigration,

a ridiculous idea,

but the only person ever known to be
documented to have launched over the wall

from Mexico to the United States

was in fact a US citizen

who was given permission
to human cannonball over the wall

200 feet so long as he carried
his passport in hand (Laughter)

and he landed safely in a net
on the other side.

And my thoughts are inspired by
a quote by the architect Hassan Fathy,

who said,

"Architects do not design walls,

but the spaces in between."

So while I do not think that architects
should be designing walls,

I do think it's important and urgent
that they should be paying attention

to those spaces in between.

They should be designing for the places
and the people, the landscapes,

that the wall endangers.