Unbuild The Wall

Creating Bridges by Eroding Barriers

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Walls historically symbolize division, containment, and control. In contrast, erosion is a slow and powerful process of dissolution—breaking down boundaries and revealing new forms of connection. Unbuild the Wall reimagines the U.S.–Mexico border not as a fixed line of exclusion, but as a living, shifting, eroding system—a site where architecture, ecology, and culture converge to create shared space, not separation.

 

The project takes a radical stance: rather than reinforce a barrier, it proposes to erode it—physically, symbolically, and infrastructurally—transforming the border into a corridor of reconciliation, regeneration, and flow.

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The River That No Longer Reaches the Sea

 

Today, one of the most profound and under-acknowledged tragedies of the U.S.–Mexico border is this: the Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California. Diverted, dammed, and consumed entirely by the U.S., the river—once a life-giving force for both nations—runs dry before it can touch Mexican soil. Communities in northern Mexico, including the border city of Nogales, suffer from water scarcity while watching the river they once depended on vanish upstream.

 

Unbuild the Wall confronts this injustice directly by proposing the rerouting of a portion of the Colorado River to Nogales, returning water as an act of healing and reciprocity. Water becomes the central architectural and political tool—not only dissolving the physical wall, but restoring dignity, ecology, and shared resource.

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Architecture of Erosion, Infrastructure of Repair

 

Instead of reinforcing the border, the design initiates a long erosion—where the existing wall is broken down into a series of fragments, each replaced by terrain, vegetation, water flow, and gathering spaces.

 

• A rerouted river channel flows through the corridor, lined with riparian planting and public access points.

• The former wall zone becomes an inverted watershed—a place where water, not fencing, shapes space and sustains life.

• Modular structures—markets, pavilions, bridges, shade halls—are embedded within this new riverine ecology, facilitating public gathering, trade, and cultural exchange.

 

The architecture is responsive, light, and porous—never impeding the flow, always adapting to it.​

 

From Segregation to Integration

 

• The border is no longer a line of control but a landscape of encounter: Americans and Mexicans walk alongside the same water, gather under the same canopies, and participate in a shared civic ecology.

• Checkpoints are reimagined as public nodes—not of surveillance, but of storytelling, memory, and mutual aid.

• Water is not only a symbol—it is an active force, carving a new spatial, cultural, and ecological identity for the region.

 

This is not simply the removal of a wall. It is the construction of a new commons.

 

What Flows Replaces What Divides

 

In Unbuild the Wall, erosion becomes a method of healing fractured landscapes and communities. The rerouting of the Colorado River is both literal and symbolic—returning life to parched land, restoring cross-border relationships, and demonstrating that infrastructure can serve unity, not control.

 

This is architecture as reparation and renewal. A wall once built to divide is unbuilt by water, time, and collective will—leaving behind a corridor of shared future, where borders are not barriers, but bridges.