Project Walls. Inhabiting the border between U.S.A. and Mexico
An investigation about the complex nature of the border between San Diego and Tijuana, and the problematic relations within the neighboring territories. The border maintains its crossing-point nature, but it expands and becomes thick enough to contain a city, whose purpose is to keep the two cultures distinct, to educate about a different one and to re-educate passengers about their own culture. The city becomes a device of cultural transformation and it is organized in a sequence of fragments of Mexican and American cities, held together by the coercive action of two walls.
Project Walls. Inhabiting the border between U.S.A. and Mexico is a critical reflection on the complex nature of the border between different places, different cultures and about the relationships that are established in that condition. The project investigates the emblematic case of the San Diego-Tijuana conurbation, one of the most critical sectors of the border between the U.S.A. and Mexico, in which a double separation fence is present with which the two cities interact in a totally opposite way: on the American side keeping a distance from the wall, on the Mexican side placing itself against it. In both of the case the barrier is both separation and crossing device and connection between the two states, just as daily transit space of all who live and work across the border.
The aim of the research, therefore, is not to propose solutions, but rather undermine the rhetoric of the border itself investigating the nature of the place of relationship and construction of specific identities. The architecture is the tool of foreshadowing of these relations.
The project is about a linear city situated exactly in the pertinence strip of the actual border. The border maintains its crossing-point nature, but it expands and becomes thick enough to contain a city, whose purpose is to keep the two cultures distinct - the American one and the Mexican one -, to educate about a different one and to re-educate passengers about their own culture.
The city becomes a device of cultural transformation and it is organized in a sequence of fragments of Mexican and American cities, held together by the coercive action of two walls. In this way it gives a concrete form to the presence of the two identities, becoming a dwelling place in which manage the encounter and dialogue between the two cultures.
The project is a reflection of the content and the container. The ongoing dialogue between the two cultures (the content) takes place through the symbolic function of the architecture and in a more specific way through the succession of portions of Mexican and American cities organized by programmatic segments (the Residential District, the University District, the Monument District, the Free-time District and the Working District), interspersed with empty spaces (the Buffer Zones).
Everything coexists thanks to the action of the two enclosing walls (the container) that run parallel from east to west and in whom the infrastructural system of the city is located. Direct transit from north to south and vice versa is replaced by a linear pass through the system of walls and the districts that they contain. The mandatory passage through the districts represents and exasperates the reciprocal processes of Americanization and Mexicanization that characterize the two neighboring cultures.
