Archinect - News

Section of US-Mexico border wall topples over in high winds

2020-01-30T10:00:00-05:00

A newly erected section of the border wall on the US-Mexico border toppled over in high winds this week. The section fell over onto the Mexicali, Mexico side of the border just across from Calexico, California. Luckily, no one was injured due to the failure.

According to local agent Carlos Pitones of the United States Department of Customs and Border Patrol, the wall had been recently installed in fresh concrete footings that had yet to cure, CNN reports. The area has been battered by strong winds this week, with gusts reaching strengths of up to 37 miles-per-hour, according to the National Weather Service.

The scene could be a sign of things to come, should presidential contender Bernie Sanders be elected. At an event in Iowa last week, Sanders, who has been a vocal critic of the wall project and has vowed to disband the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, hinted that he would be open to possibly tearing down the wall, VICE News reports, though only if it was not p...

The Department of Homeland Security plans to start building prototypes for Mexico border wall this summer

2017-06-28T14:55:00-04:00

Congress may not have agreed to President Trump's $2.6 billion budget proposal for his much-touted border wall, but that has not stopped Customs and Border Protection from preparing for the first stage of the project; testing prototypes for the border protection.

According to Ronald Vitiello, Customs and Border Protection’s acting deputy commissioner, $20 million, allocated from other programs, have been used to pay four to eight companies that will be contracted to produce prototypes for the border wall with Mexico. To be completed within 30 days in San Diego those prototypes will then serve as models for the roughly 2,000-mile border. More than 600 companies submitted designs for the wall before a March deadline.
“Think of it,” Trump told a crowd at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “The higher it goes, the more valuable it is. Pretty good imagination, right?”

Border Wall submissions are in, including proposals with solar panels, tourist destinations, nuclear waste storage, art, and a shared "co-nation"

2017-04-05T19:29:00-04:00

The government won't identify companies until contracts are awarded around June 1 — and even then, only the winners — but some bidders released plans on their own

Although many political agendas have trickled into the realm of design, the border wall continues to be a hot topic for architects. Since the inception of this project, social media has highlighted the "We Won't Build Your Wall" campaign, which has been prevalent at a number of architectural schools in the U.S. and overseas. This campaign did not stop the U.S. government from soliciting ideas and proposals from contractors which were due Tuesday. The request for proposals (RFPs) deadline for the U.S.-Mexico border wall are in, and the Associated Press points out that companies will not be revealed until an award is given. However, some proposals have been released by the bidders themselves.

The sample list presented in the article give variations on the future wall with some employing different traits such as using art, renewable energy resources, novelty architecture, and nuclear waste storage.

___

SOLAR PANELS

Gleason Partners LLC of Las Vegas proposes solar panels to cover sections...

Architecture and the Wall: Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman on the US-Mexico Border

2016-06-23T12:45:00-04:00

..We must expose rather than mask the institutional mechanisms driving uneven urban development. Such a revelation requires a corresponding expansion of our understanding of the scope of architecture itself—can we design human rights, for example? Can social justice become an architectural protocol? In other words, the most important materials with which architects must learn to work are not steel and concrete but critical knowledge of the underlying conditions that produce today’s urban crises.

The article makes reference to the controversy generated a few months ago over a competition to design Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposed border wall between the US and Mexico. The editors of Bustler, Archinect's sister site, decided not to host the competition due to potential conflicts with our ethical standards, writing, "We are conflicted about the nature of the competition and fear that it promotes xenophobia. The competition goes against the ethical standards we strive to align ourselves with.”

For more on the competition, check out the editorial on Bustler.