Design Competition — or Ideological Crisis?

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/design-competition-or-ideological-crisis.html

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Donald J. Trump ran on a platform of building a wall on the southern border of the United States when 650 miles of wall is already built. If he does nothing, he needs only to inform people that the existing 650 miles of wall (O.K., it’s a non-contiguous fence) is working.

Still, the Trump administration has wasted no time in fast-tracking a bigger and costlier wall (2,000 miles’ worth), in what could amount to the largest and most costly infrastructure project since the Works Progress Administration.

Two weeks ago, the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection issued a single paragraph presolicitation notice for “the design and build of several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States border with Mexico,” with an unprecedentedly speedy goal of selecting of awarding contracts by April 2017.

Who will design it? (We all know who will build it, right?) Still stinging from the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) postelection statement, an ingratiating gesture of support for President-elect Trump’s campaign pledge to embark on a $500 billion infrastructure building program, the architecture and design community is up in arms over the Request for Proposal for the wall. (I asked the A.I.A., which had later apologized for the statement, for a comment on the R.F.P.; they said they didn’t have one.) Many suggest that the only right response is no response at all; another firm justified their participation by making the argument that it’s possible to engage by taking “a post-national position.” But is no response the only right one here?

Though I’m sure he’ll take credit for it, Trump didn’t originate the idea of a border wall. Both the Bush and Obama administrations advocated for one, and after George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006 to “protect the American people,” The Times called on 13 architects and urban planners to design proposals for it (several abstained). In response to Trump’s calls for a wall, the Third Mind Foundation, created by a group of architects, designers and artists, sponsored a “Build the Border Wall” competition last year. Then as now, the border wall project promises to be an enormous construction boondoggle. And then as now, companies that are signing up want to make a profit. But the Trump context has made this controversial issue even more incendiary.

I got in touch with Fonna Forman, a political scientist, and Teddy Cruz, an architect, both professors at the University of California, San Diego, who who co-direct the UCSD Cross-Border Initiative, for their thoughts on the border wall quandary.

“O.K., fine, let’s imagine that a certain degree of pragmatism might guide some decisions right now,” the pair said in an email, “that Trump might surprise us and take a more functional problem-solving approach to investing in public infrastructure. The problem for us is that problem solving or business smartness without ethics, and without respect for human dignity, and without a sensibility toward social justice … is simply just business.”

The Architecture Lobby, an organization that advocates for such things as wage transparency, fair labor practices and structural change within the architectural profession, has called for a day of action today in opposition to the proposed southwestern border wall.“Participating in this R.F.P., even by not submitting what is asked,” Quilian Riano, an architectural designer and Architecture Lobby coordinator, wrote to me in an email, “is playing into the political ideology that allowed this R.F.P. to be released in the first place.”

The architect Keefer Dunn, national organizer for the lobby, added in an email, “Companies like the ones I work for have a longstanding pre-existing relationship with D.H.S. and an extensive working knowledge of the federal building procurement process — this is not a system we can game in our favor. Refusal to apply our expertise to projects like this is a form of participation, and the best tool of resistance we have.” But others, like Ronald Rael, whose book “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary” will be published on April 4th, right around the time the government will be deciding on border wall submissions, can be seen as both a protest against the wall and a forecast about its future.

“I’m really hesitant to say the wall has provided an opportunity,” he told me over coffee in Berkeley last week, but he makes the argument that we should view the nearly 700 miles of wall as an opportunity for economic and social development along the border — while at the same time encouraging its conceptual and physical dismantling.

Rael’s proposals play at notions of the wall not just as a purveyor of security, but also as productive infrastructure — as the very backbone of a borderland economy. In all this work, he says: “We aren’t proposing walls but urging that something be done alongside them. Something is happening, and we are attempting to intercept it, to smuggle in design so these landscapes won’t be destroyed.”

In a chapter called “Recuerdos/Souvenirs: A Nuevo Grand Tour,” Rael presents what he terms a series of “unsolicited counterproposals for the wall, both tragic and sublime.” They range from Board(er) Game, a series of cards each printed with one of the challenges posed to immigrants on their journey from Mexico to the United States, to the Cactus Wall, “a new infrastructure of prickly succulents” that proposes a redirection of wall funds toward an investment in an infrastructure of planting and ecology restoration.

Also included here are absurd but all-too-real government-funded experiments like the Fence Lab, which tested nine different fence designs, many of which were dismantled in minutes by border patrol agents to the shock of the engineers who created them, as well astounding feats of ingenuity on display in border crossing, including projectiles and catapults to transport drugs, and maybe even people, across the border and tunneling efforts on par with El Chapo’s.

Rael writes that one of the most devastating consequences of the wall is “the division of communities, cities, neighborhoods and families, resulting in the erosion of social infrastructure.” When we talked, he wondered how we might create something positive from something so horrible: “Can reform happen through borderland investment? If you build 150 libraries along the border, you’d get a very different outcome.”

Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of Homeland Security and governor of Arizona, once said, “You show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.” Yet we persist in not only maintaining that wall but expanding it. The border wall is a symbolic and real barrier. It aims to create a neat binary in a complex world. North vs. south. The United States vs. Mexico. Legal vs. illegal. Us vs. them. The polarizing effect is both insidious and intentional. The Trump administration isn’t likely to entertain any proposal that doesn’t reinforce that — but I’m not entirely convinced that means we shouldn’t try.