U.S.-Mexico border wall design competition announced

in graffiti, or otherwise vandalized.

What the magazine Slate has called “The Great Wall of Trump” may or may not be a better answer. But if, as polls indicate, it is an idea that is gaining some traction among a significant amount of Americans, we believe it should be considered as a serious architectural question. A border barrier of any sort presents formidable challenges for the architect.

First, Slate pointed out that the wall would traverse valley, mountain, river, Indian reservation, private land, state property, even the library of a state university. The permitting alone might be insurmountable, let alone the land acquisition, neither of which are provided for in Trump’s proposal.

A CNN news story pointed out that the wall will have to extend at least five feet underground to prevent tunneling and at least twenty feet above ground to make scaling it difficult (Trump plans a height of 30 or 40 feet). After consulting with civil engineers, architects, and academics, the CNN report weighed the pros and cons of using readily available cinderblocks and poured concrete. They determined that stacking and mortaring the former would be cost prohibitive and so labor-intensive as to be next to impossible. Poured concrete was more feasible, but it also ran into problems. If the concrete is poured in hot conditions (a desert, say), the concrete will likely not dry properly, leaving the wall susceptible to crumbling. If poured concrete were used, however, a wall of this size would require 339 million cubic feet of the material, plus five billion pounds of reinforced steel.

Trump initially claimed his concrete wall could be built for approximately $8 billion. But as soon as media began consulting with engineers and coming up with numbers of their own, he revised the figure upward: to $10-$12 billion. Many sources say this still grossly underestimates the actual cost.

In 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that one mile of fencing was between $2.8 million and $3.9 million. That means that at 2009 prices, completing the existing barriers (that is, erecting another 1,370 miles of fence) would require between a little over $3.75 billion and about $5.23 billion in material costs. But adjusted for inflation and taking into account transporting materials to remote locations (the middle of the desert or the mountains), the approximately 40,000 workers needed for the job, land acquisition costs, technology to monitor the fence, and other expenses, those numbers quickly escalate.

CNBC, consulting with the deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, came up with a range of $15 billion to $25 billion. The Washington Post figure was about $42 billion for just 1,000 miles of 25-foot concrete wall.

Lastly, there is the issue of maintenance. The Corps of Engineers estimated that the cost of a fence’s 25-year life cycle would range between $16.4 million to $70 million per mile (presumably the spread is wide due to the unpredictable nature of the degree of vandalism perpetrated by illegal crossers, severe weather conditions at different points along the fence, and other factors). And Politico estimated that maintenance of a concrete wall would run about $750 million annually.

Are these challenges insurmountable? Is the idea patently ridiculous on a purely practical and moral basis? Are there better solutions to the perceived “problem” of illegal immigration, which, as many have pointed out, is a situation that has been going on for decades, if not centuries, and is tacitly exploited by both countries in this debate for its mutual economic benefits? If not a fence or wall, then what? Can the idea of a wall be combined with architectural activism?

The Third Mind Foundation says that this the challenge of the Building the Border Wall competition: “To bring creativity and innovation to bear on the idea of a border barrier, and in so doing, expand the boundaries and re-conceptualize the current debate beyond sound-bites, statistics, and unrealistic monetary figures.”

The Third Mind Foundation is a group of architects, designers, and artists, who wish to remain anonymous. This is our first organized competition. Any profits, after expenses, will be used for a future competition in 2017. “Or we will increase the amounts of the final awards as the competition progresses,” the foundation notes.