Design as diplomacy?
NY Times: A Fence With More Beauty, Fewer Barbs
“Having trouble with the neighbors? Put up a fence. If things go well, you hang out at the fence and talk. That’s not generally the thinking for fences between nations; such barriers can’t easily mask their harsh purpose. Now a fence is proposed for the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico in an effort to improve national security and stem illegal immigration … But maybe some form of backyard diplomacy is in order — Mexico is no enemy — and there are obvious suspects for the job: professional designers, whose duty it is to come up with welcome solutions that defy ugly problems; to create appeal where there might be none. As a classic design challenge, The New York Times asked 13 architects and urban planners to devise the ‘fence.’ Several declined because they felt it was purely a political issue. ‘It’s a silly thing to design, a conundrum,’ said Ricardo Scofidio of Diller Scofidio & Renfro in New York. ‘You might as well leave it to security and engineers.’ Four of the five who submitted designs proposed making the boundary a point of innovative integration, not traditional division — something that could be seen, from both sides, as a horizon of opportunity, not as a barrier … Eric Owen Moss, an architect in Los Angeles, was more specific with his border as beacon of light. In his design, a strolling, landscaped arcade of lighted glass columns would invite a social exchange in the evening, much like the ‘paseo,‘ popular in Hispanic culture. ‘Make something between cultures, which leads to a third,’ Mr. Moss said. ‘Celebrate the amalgamation of the two.’ Enrique Norten, an architect born in Mexico who has offices now in Mexico City and New York with his firm TEN Arquitectos, proposed using the fence budget to build infrastructures like highways instead.”
So, the Times took the position that a fence is inevitable, and challenged architects and designers to make that fence more diplomatic. What happens if - like Scofidio - designers choose the principle of non-interference? How can designers make the world a better place for people? What if - like Norten - we don’t take the fence to be inevitable? What are we then able to do? And what if - like Moss - designers don’t see the inevitability of the fence as a failure, but rather the opportunity to change how we imagine and experience all kinds of boundaries?
Both diplomacy and design involve delicate art and robust practice in directing relations between people, places and things - and it’s these relations that are political. So if design is always already political, then what sorts of diplomacy can we expect - or demand - from designers?
(via)
Update: Design Will Not Save the World - interesting distinctions between “puzzle problems, wicked problems and intractable predicaments,” but positions the problem in such a way that the answer can only be all or nothing. (via)
June 19th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Brilliant! So many opportunities for intervention, for querying the state of things, for making relationships manifest. There are so many potential ‘people of the fence’ that one could run an ongoing workshop to take in the multitude of views and aspirations. What is a fence to the displaced of New Orleans? Or to the people who fly over it on holidays? To the people on the ‘inside’? Contrast this with the Berlin Wall and the Israel/Palestine wall, and ask whether those walls performed as intended; to enhance socialism on the one hand, and preserve national identity on the other. Such barriers are never simply about keeping people in or out: they are meant to serve - or preserve - social priorities.
I also wonder if this is a return to the cordon sanitaire, the liminal space between states, a space of passage, or of blurring the distinctions between one side and the other? Could it be designed in such a way that those inside are welcome to stay indefinitely, as an alternative to living in the departure lounge of an airport?
If the space can assume utopian qualities, can it also function as the dystopia both nations require? Is the fence meant to keep people in as much as it’s meant to fence people out? Could the wall be a prison, to an equal or greater extent than it is a place of passage? Perhaps designers should be asking about what the fence is meant to express on behalf of people either side of it. Should the northern side appear welcoming, open, transparent? As indiative of peace and freedom? Or should that be the face of the southern side?