Ronald Rael is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Masters of Architecture Committee in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley. He directs the printFARM Laboratory (print Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials), holds a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture, in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice, and is both a Bakar and Hellman Fellow.
?His book, Borderwall as Architecture, is 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. It is both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future. Through a series of propositions suggesting that the nearly seven hundred miles of wall is an opportunity for economic and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling, the book takes readers on a journey along a wall that cuts through a “third nation”—the Divided States of America.
