"...a timely re-examination of what the physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is and could be...alongside the architectural brutality and social displacement that almost automatically accompany such borders, Ronald Rael and his contributors also explore the ways in which highlighting the border can be transformed into new opportunities."—Times Higher Education
“Borderwall As Architecture goes into keen scholarly detail on the walls at the US-Mexico border…Rael offers many such concepts in the book, which often have a whimsy about them that reminds me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.”
—Bruce Sterling, New Scientist
“[Rael’s] imagination is audacious, and he smartly frames his “grand tour” of the border as a procession of vignettes that shift easily between history, architectural what-ifs and what you might call postcards from the front.”—John King, San Francisco Chronicle
"...in raising questions that not many others are asking about the relationship between two countries that share 2,000 miles of border, his book serves an important purpose."—The Daily Beast
“[A} small book with big ideas…Rael shows that alternative proposals depicted through architecture (drawings, models, renderings) are also a legitimate form of protest.”—A Daily Dose of Architecture
"While border walls and separation now seem inevitable, Rael’s subversive designs seem to indicate a way forward: They allow us to cope with the current moment by preparing for a less segregated future."—World Policy Journal
"This is a work that harks back to the days of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan — especially the latter."—Diplomat & International Canada
“Rael presents the wall not as a simple securitized object but as a critical facet of life cutting through communities and the desert— [for example] …“House Divided” presents a mode for architecture to both illustrate the recursive logic of the geometric barrier and frame it within a domestic typology that can be read in all of its complex relations.”—The Avery Review
"Rael sees endless opportunities for creative defiance as he exposes the wall’s xenophobic horror stories, absurdities and ironies by imagining design as both an undermining and reparative measure... [his proposals] force us to re-examine the feasibility of constructing “a big beautiful wall” around fortress America by underscoring that borders are innate zones of connectivity as much as division."—New York Journal of Books
“A fascinating book, astonishing and magical: a realm where the absurdity of a wall is transformed from obstructive and negative to an affirmation of shared humanity.”—Judith Torrea, journalist and author based in Ciudad Juárez, México
"Timely and provocative,
Borderwall as Architecture is an eloquent appeal to reconsider the principles and prejudices of nationalism within the context of the built environment."—Jonathon Keats, experimental philosopher and author of
You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future “No longer sovereign limits of exchange, borders are at once indexes of national as well as individual identities.
Borderwall as Architecture interrogates how the the securitization of the United States' southernmost limits radically define new landscapes of transaction that can also be visualized as a tool of violence. Among Ronald Rael's elegant ironies seen across anticipatory yet moving drawings and projects, the Mexico-US border fence/wall registers a figurative logic in which seemingly banal aspects of porosity, transparency, and locality also confront architecture's and our own roles in two nations' un-becoming.”—Sean Anderson, Curator, Architecture and Design, MOMA
