Borderwall as Architecture

Borderwall as Architecture
Author: Ronald Rael
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0520283945

Borderwall as public space / Teddy Cruz -- Ronald Rael -- Pilgrims at the wall / Marcello Di Cintio -- Borderwall as architecture / Ronald rael -- Transborderisms / Norma Iglesias-Prieto -- Recuerdos / Ronald Rael -- Why walls don't work / Michael Dear -- Afterwards / Ronald Rael

Earth Architecture

Earth Architecture
Author: Ronald Rael
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568987675

"The ground we walk on and grow crops in also just happens to be the most widely used building material on the planet. Civilizations throughout time have used it to create stable warm low-impact structures. The world's first skyscrapers were built of mud brick. Paul Revere Chairman Mao and Ronald Reagan all lived in earth houses at various points in their lives and several of the buildings housing Donald Judd's priceless collection at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas are made of mud brick." "While the vast legacy of traditional and vernacular earthen construction has been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the contemporary tradition of earth architecture. Author Ronald Rael founder of Eartharchitecture.org provides a history of building with earth in the modern era focusing particularly on projects constructed in the last few decades that use rammed earth mud brick compressed earth cob and several other interesting techniques. Earth Architecture presents a selection of more than 40 projects that exemplify new creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet."--BOOK JACKET.

14 Miles

14 Miles
Author: DW Gibson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501183427

An esteemed journalist delivers a compelling on-the-ground account of the construction of President Trump’s border wall in San Diego—and the impact on the lives of local residents. In August of 2019, Donald Trump finished building his border wall—at least a portion of it. In San Diego, the Army Corps of engineers completed two years of construction on a 14-mile steel beamed barrier that extends eighteen-feet high and cost a staggering $147 million. As one border patrol agent told reporters visiting the site, “It was funded and approved and it was built under his administration. It is Trump’s wall.” 14 Miles is a definitive account of all the dramatic construction, showing readers what it feels like to stand on both sides of the border looking up at the imposing and controversial barrier. After the Department of Homeland Security announced an open call for wall prototypes in 2017, DW Gibson, an award-winning journalist and Southern California native, began visiting the construction site and watching as the prototype samples were erected. Gibson spent those two years closely observing the work and interviewing local residents to understand how it was impacting them. These include April McKee, a border patrol agent leading a recruiting program that trains teenagers to work as agents; Jeff Schwilk, a retired Marine who organizes pro-wall rallies as head of the group San Diegans for Secure Borders; Roque De La Fuente, an eccentric millionaire developer who uses the construction as a promotional opportunity; and Civile Ephedouard, a Haitian refugee who spent two years migrating through Central America to the United States and anxiously awaits the results of his asylum case. Fascinating, propulsive, and incredibly timely, 14 Miles is an important work that explains not only how the wall has reshaped our landscape and countless lives but also how its shadow looms over our very identity as a nation.

Why Walls Won't Work

Why Walls Won't Work
Author: Michael Dear
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2013-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199323909

Why Walls Won't Work is a sweeping account of life along the United States-Mexico border zone, tracing the border's history of cultural interaction since the earliest Mesoamerican times to the present day. As soon as Mexicans, American settlers, and indigenous peoples came into contact along the Rio Grande in the mid-nineteenth century, new forms of interaction and affiliation evolved. By the late-twentieth century, the border states were among the fastest-growing regions in both countries. But as Michael Dear warns, this vibrant zone of economic, cultural and social connectivity is today threatened by highly restrictive American immigration and security policies as well as violence along the border. The U.S. border-industrial complex and the emerging Mexican narco-state are undermining the very existence of the "third nation" occupying the space between Mexico and the U.S. Through a series of evocative portraits of contemporary border communities, Dear reveals how the promise and potential of this "in-between" nation still endures and is worth protecting. Now with a new chapter updating this story and suggesting what should be done about the challenges confronting the cross-border zone, Why Walls Won't Work represents a major intellectual intervention into one of the most hotly-contested political issues of our era.

Two Sides of the Border

Two Sides of the Border
Author: Tatiana Bilbao
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9783037786086

What if we stopped dividing the US and Mexico, and instead saw the border as one region? This book envisions the cultural and industrial cohesion of the area At a moment when migration has returned as a hot-button political issue and NAFTA is being renegotiated as the USMC, political discourse has exaggerated differences on either side of the shared US/Mexico border. But what if we stopped dividing the United States and Mexico into two separate nations, and instead studied their shared histories, cultures and economies, acknowledging them as parts of a single region? In 2018, under the direction of Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, 13 architecture studios and their students across the United States and Mexico undertook the monumental task of attempting to rethink the US/Mexico border as a complex and dynamic, but also cohesive and integrated, region. Two Sides of the Borderenvisions the borderlands through five themes: creative industries and local production, migration, housing and cities, territorial economies and tourism. Building on a long shared history in the region, the projects in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political and ecological concerns along our shared border. Featuring essays, student projects, interviews, special research and a large photo project by Iwan Baan, Two Sides of the Borderexplores the distinct qualities which characterize this place. The book uses the tools of architecture, research and photography to articulate an alternate reality within a contested region. Participating architectural programs and projects include Cornell University College of Architecture and Art, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Texas Tech University College of Architecture in El Paso, University of Texas at Austin, Universidad Iberoamericana, Universidad de Monterey UDEM, University of Michigan, University of Washington Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, and Yale School of Architecture.

Border Wall Aesthetics

Border Wall Aesthetics
Author: Elisa Ganivet
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3839447771

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we live in a time of globalization and free trade. Nevertheless, 70 new border walls have been built in this period - put together, they would cover the total circumference of the Earth. While governments offer manifold justifications for building these separation barriers, they invariably attract the attention of artists. Is it merely the lure of transgression, however, that attracts them - or is there a deeper significance in the artistic encounter with border walls? And which artistic strategies do these artists employ to approach them? In order to address these questions, Élisa Ganivet revisits the history of border wall aesthetics and compares more recent border-related works by 100 artists, including Joseph Beuys (Berlin), Banksy (Israel-Palestine), and Frida Kahlo (Mexico-US). Through art and thus beyond art, we understand the flaws and shortcomings of supposedly well-oiled systems. With a preface by Élisabeth Vallet.

Walls

Walls
Author: Marcello di Cintio
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2013-08-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1593765657

What does it mean to live against a wall? Travel to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire, concrete, and steel and how the structure of the walls has influenced their lives. In this ambitious first person narrative, Marcello Di Cintio shares tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco’s desert wall. He meets with illegal Punjabi migrants who have circumvented the fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He visits fenced-in villages in northeast India, walks Arizona’s migrant trails, and travels to Palestinian villages to witness the protests against Israel’s security barrier. From Native American reservations on the U.S.-Mexico border and the “Great Wall of Montreal” to Cyprus’s divided capital and the Peace Lines of Belfast, Di Cintio seeks to understand what these structures say about those who build them and how they influence the cultures that they pen in. He learns that while every wall fails to accomplish what it was erected to achieve – the walls are never solutions – each wall succeeds at something else. Some walls define Us from Them with Medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate. Some walls steal. Others kill. And every wall inspires its own subversion, either by the infiltrators who dare to go over, under, or around them, or by the artists who transform them.

Border Wars

Border Wars
Author: Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1982117419

Two New York Times Washington correspondents provide a detailed, “fact-based account of what precipitated some of this administration’s more brazen assaults on immigration” (The Washington Post) filled with never-before-told stories of this key issue of Donald Trump’s presidency. No issue matters more to Donald Trump and his administration than restricting immigration. Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

Walls

Walls
Author: David Frye
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501172719

“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live. With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out. The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.