gone fencing

I originally wrote this essay in 2006 after reading the NYTimes piece “IDEAS & TRENDS; A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs,” and sent it to Cynthia Davidson at Log. It was set to be published (and I got a great edit from Ms. Davidson), but due to circumstances out of my control, it never appeared in print. Later my friend Ronald Rael asked to use it in his studio at Berkeley (check out his other work regarding the Border as Infrastructure), and so I have now decided to go ahead and post it in full.

“Gone fencing”

In November 2005, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Duncan Hunter (CA-R) proposed to build a two-layer metal fence, filled with high-tech accoutrements, on a 300-foot-wide security zone along the entire US/Mexico border. In December 2005, the House of Representatives voted in favor of bill H.R. 4437 to counter terrorism and illegal immigration by intensifying the protection of the national border. This bill authorized the building of a fence along sections of the border. Riding the wave of controversy that has surrounded border issues, in its June 18, 2006 edition, the New York Times asked 13 architects and urban planners to respond to the desires and fears voiced by certain members of Congress on the “porous” border with Mexico.

According to reporter William Hamilton’s article, the architects sought the “amelioration of a political condition.” [i] Hamilton concentrated on five projects in particular: Eric Owen Moss’s The Glass Forest; Enrique Norten’s The Expressway; Calvin Tsao’s The Cities of Lights; Field Operations/James Corner’s The Energy Source, and Antoine Predock’s The Mirage. These projects represented a panoply of possibilities: the regional response (Predock and Moss); the international (Tsao), the technological (Corner) and, of course, the “local” (or Mexican, as represented by Norten). There was no record of the additional eight participants. There was also little trace of those architects and planners who refused to participate in the project. Hamilton hinted at such dissent from New York’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who declined to participate in a project they identified as a political quagmire.

The mercurial rhetoric underlying these projects is something we have grown accustomed to in an age of political quick-change. “Terrorism” becomes “immigration,” “immigration” becomes “national security,” and the “illegal alien” becomes the “terrorist.” These semantic loops constitute the status quo within which these projects complacently operate. The architect’s ability to adapt to the changing winds of national politics makes us believe that compliance is a new form of reflection, and that by displaying the drama of our times, architecture offers us a viable and moral solution. In these efforts the projects suggest the semblance of a collective. But we are far from the modern vigor that prompted a utopian call for a better society, and that believed that imagination could counter the alienating effects of capitalism. These five border projects conceive of the future as part of the productive order – that is, as the return of the same. Modernism was partially characterized by an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the present, which fueled a desire for change and a longing for a lost unity. These architects, on the other hand, are full of resignation.

Antoine Predock’s proposal, The Mirage, is full of cruel overtones. An earthen wall replaces a conventional fence, yet, the wall is merely a secondary system within a codified play of political gestures. In an oblique reference to sustainability, Predock proposes that the desert itself act as the border. But this is not your grandma’s desert: statistics show that this arid natural divide between the US and Mexico is simply not doing its job. For Predock the desert just needs a little help – it is simply not hot enough! A heating system placed under crushed rocks on the Mexican side of the earth wall creates a shimmering mechanism that dematerializes the border. This frying pan serves as the desired “300-foot-wide security zone,” incinerating anything attempting to cross it. The benign metaphor of the mirage has been turned into a political slogan. Here “mirage” is another word for “annihilation,” much as “collateral damage” really means “civilian deaths.” The mirage is insurmountable, revealing its true political agenda. The earth wall itself – “pushed into place by Mexican day laborers,” according to Predock – is seemingly part of an “uplifting” open border. But Predock’s sketch of a dematerialized border is only callous play with the dreams and needs of immigrants. The wall “would appear to lift …off the ground, in the way that heat in the desert appears to make objects hover, like mirages.” But this inviting gesture of “good will,” as he calls it, is uttered only through a hypocritical doubletalk that escapes all sense of decorum and sympathy.

Moss’s Glass Forest is perhaps the most naive for its banal use of Terragni’s Danteum columns – complete with an illuminated underground gallery. Moss populates the border with transparent columns that emerge from a raised mound, creating a wall that rises to the sky and illuminates the night (unavoidably recalling Albert Speer’s Cathederal of Light). The column-wall also illuminates an underground, tunnel-like art gallery – complete with a pseudo Siqueiros mural – that is actually a gate between the U. S. and Mexico.

The simplicity of Moss’s project is precisely what is most perverse and manipulative. All signs of development are gone. There is no recognition of the infrastructures that transport people to the border, or those that prevent them from entering the United States. For Moss, people are simply “in” the landscape – hanging out, it seems. They collectively gather around this image of glass, transparency, and transcendence to contemplate this 2,000-mile abstract sculpture. How they arrive, one can’t tell; apparently they all – from both sides of the border, guided by a desire for social exchange – walked.

The lack of infrastructure erases all differences and makes one wonder: which side is which? Hovering over the border as if wanting to construct a balanced sympathetic image only signals a manufactured confusion. The border mutates into land art, taking on the sublime equalizing effect of abstract art. However, with the Glass Forest, land art is used in the service of politics; cultural-historical forms are brought in to signify the geo-political divide. The typology of the paseo is resurrected yet again to represent Mexico; the U.S. side is barren, and lacking any cultural references.  Moss decontextualizes the Mexican paseo, extracting it from history, and, in the process, hiding the reference to the leisure class that gave form to this urban typology. Instead, this leisurely activity comes dangerously close to looking like laziness, as rendered figures loaf in a soporific daydream, waiting for the hour of true spectacle – the night, when the forest is set ablaze. Then the “beacon of light” becomes a luring lantern, and the immigrant –like a moth enthralled by a flame – is trapped by glass “sentries” that guard the border.

The sky is also illuminated in Calvin Tsao’s The Cities of Light. Modeled, according to Tsao, after the extraordinary growth of the Shenzhen region in China, this glowing border can only spell happiness. Here, the Megalopolis of Jean Gottmann becomes the Ecumenopolis of Constantinos Dioxiades. But we cannot forget that ecumaniacs also propose the dissolution of all borders. Thus, Tsao’s stratospheric presentation, showing all of North America from the air, puts us at a distance from the border, eradicating the local minutia that can only complicate such a schema. One is literally blinded by the light.

For Tsao, economic forces are the solution to the problem; what the project ignores is that economic forces are precisely the cause of the problem. The eradication of local labor markets in Mexico sets workers in motion. Freed from the forces that bound them to their localities, but also severed from the possibility of sustaining themselves, people will travel. The million specks of lights that Tsao conjures rest on this freedom from land and livelihood demanded by the market.

In his mystification, Tsao unwittingly reveals a political agenda that remains deeply hidden in the border crisis. If Shenzhen is to serve as an economic model, then would it not serve as a political model as well if we are to replicate its success? Is the US to adopt the authoritarian political system that has made Shenzhen possible? The “Great Wall of Mexico,” as global security companies have described it, prefigures the end of democracy. Success stories like Shenzhen or Shanghai are crafted by positive indexes of economic growth, but also by hiding or deforming indicators of poverty and exploitation. Such control and manipulation of negative social realities is a characteristic of authoritarian regimes. Tsao’s project reveals the extent to which the neoliberal model has been naturalized and persists, no matter how much poverty and exploitation contradict the ideology of liberty and self-determination.

These projects have a leery relationship with modernity. The evanescent traces of utopia are still present, but they have been reduced to an involuntary reflex that evokes a tradition that long ago became sterile. Nonetheless, a vision of the future – as certain members of Congress have also insisted – is being called for. This utopian mood serves a politics that sees the future only as the preservation of the present. The creation of this border fence is a utopian call, but it is a utopia only for a privileged few. It is the creation of the private resort called America.

In Field Operations/James Corner’s project we return to earth like a satellite knocked out of its orbit. This team accepts the concept of the border as a “monumental fortification,” but proposes also to give it a benevolent purpose. The fortification is thus transformed using neoliberal incantations wrapped in the pseudo-humanist garb of technological sustainability. The Energy Source is a solar energy-collecting strip described as a “productive, sustainable enterprise zone that attracts industry from the north and creates employment for the south.” For Corner, this site of conflicting forces presents itself as a business opportunity.

Thus the border is industrialized. The project is conceived as a traditional megastructure, with triangulated structural frames that allow for visual transparency and openness. Ancillary structures, like windmills, spread over the landscape, claiming a vast area for development. Countering Moss’s landscape of leisurely experience, the landscape in Corner’s proposal is put to work. The triangulated frames slope toward the ground creating ramps (for loading and unloading), and enigmatic triangular arrows are superimposed onto the landscape, giving the appearance of a high-tech security zone. The perspective view of the scene presented by Corner – a traditional architectural form of representation – is now charged with the militaristic overtone of surveillance. This monumental condition of the border is both fueled by fear and promoted by global capital; capital and fear go hand in hand.

What happens on the other side? In Corner’s proposal there is no other side. This sustainable enterprise megastructure absorbs all immigration. As a source of employment for the south, this “development zone” provides and contains labor, effectively stopping it at the border. This becomes the project’s hidden agenda: America for Americans only. Corner’s industrialization project parallels Tsao’s luminous proposal; both describe a centralized, planned development. This is not the fragmented growth of individual competitors; rather, it is the homogeneous order of development under corporate and state cooperation. High-tech sustainability, represented in the triangulated megastructure of terminals, assembly plants, and the like, is enlisted in the service of neoliberal economic strategies under political guidance. With Corner, the border becomes a camp that serves the interests of neoconservative politics.

What is on the other side? Who are these other people? These questions are never answered. The refusal of the architects to consider the personal narratives that could be unearthed by these questions reveals an indifference toward the individual as a social being that is typical of capitalism. The idea of “The People” is conjured up by the official spokesmen of the border project as an abstraction that becomes the basis for a project. The population is abstracted into positive categories (“Americans”), and/or negative categories (“immigrants”) by the ruling political and social imagination. All of the architectural proposals are consistent with this ideology: representation is given only to abstraction, and thus to the powers that created it. The abstract communities of “us” and “them” supercede all individual rights: made into natural entities bound by soil these are set against one other. “America” must stop the steady flow of “immigrants.” In Corner’s project the United States is again made a victim, prey to natural forces that it cannot control. The border project is framed as a battle against nature, a naturalized economic force – the tide of immigrants – that must be contained by the social collective called America and all the tools and weapons at its disposal.

Enrique Norten, the only Mexican architect among the group, reveals this naturalization to be a myth, with his proposal, called Expressway. Highways, connections, flows, and exchanges – as opposed to borders – call the United States at its own globalization game. In 1994, NAFTA created the largest free trade area in the world, based on the facilitation of temporary cross-border movement of business travelers. The agreement effectively erases the borders with Mexico and Canada if you are a “citizen of one of the Parties…who is engaged in trade in goods, the provision of services or the conduct of investment activities.”

Immigrant laborers, under article 1608 of NAFTA, thus can qualify as “business travelers,” so long as they do not seek permanent residence[ii]. The authority that acts against immigrants is thus paradoxically the same authority that gives immigrants legal access to the US under NAFTA. Recognizing this contradiction, proponents of the fence have seized upon yet another abstraction: OTM – Other Than Mexican immigrants, a cloudy term that differs from “non-Mexican” in that it generally refers to terrorist and/or narco-traffic infiltration of the United States.[iii] With Norten’s project, one starts to disentangle the web of flows, revealing, in the process, the political conservatism embedded in economic neoliberalism.

Norten’s project is marked by both a defense of exchange (the highway) and an acceptance of the border. This is, of course, contradictory, and is never resolved. Looking closer at Norten’s scheme one realizes that, along with the multiple connecting highways, the border is still there; the difference between the brown earth and the green grass, the low development and the high development, signals its presence. How can he straddle this inconsistency? Norten’s answer is to simply stop the clock.

Expressway abandons all historical events after 1994, the year of the NAFTA agreement. Grounded in the economic relationships accorded by NAFTA, the project ignores the reality of the present. This is either a quick, cheap solution or a deliberate political statement; Norten either fails to understand or actively disregards the rise of a nationalist agenda of security after 9/11. Is the border open to all immigrants, or only to Mexicans? Does the Expressway have OTM lanes? If so, where do these lanes lead? Far too many questions appear to be left unanswered, but these silences could be read as an intentional part of the proposal.

Veiled by the rhetoric of a universal human condition, the immigrant is abstracted in Norten’s refusal to see any specificity in the immigration problem. By not acknowledging the present political agenda of security, the Expressway tacitly ends up assuming that all immigrants at the US/Mexico border are Mexican. Norten enshrines this popular misconception and uses it for what only appears as the “positive” agenda of exchange, in which being Mexican becomes a link in the evolutionary chain of economic emancipation.

The Border Project solicited by the New York Times reveals the great political contradictions in the neoliberal state, which supposedly calls for the end of all national borders. The establishment of “zones of development” as solutions to the “crisis” is the ultimate form of mystification, for it misses the inherent contradiction within the neoliberal project. The proposals for the Border Project failed to see the incongruity between the universal exchange championed by neoliberal globalism and the end or restriction of these flows that mark neoconservative localism. It is simply naïve to believe that the agenda to tighten the border is not a form of government intervention to rein in post-industrial capitalism as the political toolbox of the state.

The true failure of this exercise was the architects’ active refusal to see with clarity the quagmire of issues related to race, class and power. Grounded in the realpolitik of our time, the proposed US/Mexico border projects are aligned with something close to the official national agenda. The solutions are fashionable makeovers that perpetuate a hegemonic discourse. Swept away by the abstraction of scale – by the massive “immigration problem”– these architects chose to erase all human measures, effectively erasing their own. This lack of criticality and of identification (for in the end, the professed national subjectivity of the American is that of the immigrant) reveals the resignation of the architect. Ours may be the Golden Age of Abandonment, and this the ultimate myth elaborated through architecture — the belief that resignation is sublime.

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[i] (“IDEAS & TRENDS; A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs,” New York Times, Sunday, June 18, 2006, Week in Review, Section 4, Page 14)

[ii]United States Department of Commerce, Office of NAFTA and Inter-American Affairs, http://www.mac.doc.gov/nafta/chapter16.html#1608  (accessed October 24, 2006).

[iii]Many reactionary websites use this term to argue that the danger of terrorism is tied to immigration. The full definition of OTM used by the Office of Detention and Removal of the Department of Home Land Security, is “those illegal immigrants who are from countries other than Mexico.” According to law, “OTMs, unlike apprehended Mexican aliens, cannot be turned around and returned at the border.” The impossibility of immediate deportation frames the definition of OTM. Yet, this term is also defined by its association to illegal aliens from SIC (Special Interest Countries – countries that promote, produce or protect terrorists) and SST (State Sponsored Terrorism – government supported terrorism). http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtrpts/OIG_06-33_Apr06.pdf (accessed October 24, 2006).

some images:

Feb 09, 2010 | writings | 5 Comments »