Ronald Rael, the architecture chair at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of architecture at San José State University, have just installed a row of Pepto-pink seesaws that use the U.S.-Mexico border wall as a fulcrum to allow people on both sides to play across the divide.
Here, in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez and New Mexico’s Sunland Park, the wall’s brown steel slats are spaced wide enough that kids (and some adults) in one country can see the teeter-totters in the other.
“There are good relations between the people of Mexico and the United States, and using the seesaw shows that we are equal and we can play together and enjoy ourselves,” Rael told Ruptly.
In videos circulating on social media, the teeter-totters on both sides of the border wall do indeed look like they are having a blast:
Although the play equipment is pure fun, the project is also a comment on the reciprocal relationships between countries’ border policies and their impact on those who live and work in the borderlands. That thinking extends to the nuts and bolts of the project, too: While the architects’ California firm Rael San Fratello executed the design, Ciudad Juárez’s Taller Herrería custom-fabricated the seesaws for the installation.
San Fratello and Rael’s idea for the Teeter-Totter Wall is a decade in the making, though most first learned about it from their 2017 book, Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary.
