Pink border seesaws lead to design prize

An installation of bright pink seesaws along the U.S.-Mexican border that allowed children from both countries to play together in the shadow of a border wall, has won the Bay Area professors who designed the project a prestigious award.

Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San Jose State, and her husband, Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, have won the 2020 Beazley Design of the Year award from the Design Museum in London.

The museum’s annual awards recognize projects that have made

a real-world impact in the areas of digital, fashion, graphic and product design as well as transport and architecture. Rael and San Fratello’s work was considered among 74 short listed projects that included TikTok’s viral Renegade dance, edible drink capsules that replaced plastic bottles at the London Marathon, and a 3D graphic of the coronavirus particle.

The “Teeter-Totter Wall,” a binational seesaw at the border, originally was a conceptional design for Rael’s 2009 book, “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.” The book has been described as an “intellectual hand grenade,” and “a timely re-examination of what the 650 miles of physical barrier … is, and could be.”

With then-President Donald Trump’s drive to erect a wall along the nation’s southern border with Mexico, the teeter-totter wall jumped off the pages and into reality. In 2019 the pink seesaws were taken to Sunland Park, New Mexico, an impoverished border town where a private group built its own border wall using millions of dollars raised in a GoFundMe drive, separating Sunland Park from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

The day of the installation, children and adults from both sides came together to play in what was described as a “unifying act.”

Rael said in an Instagram post that the event was “filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall.”

“The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S.-Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side,” he wrote.

San Fratello and Rael said they hoped the work would encourage people to build bridges in communities, not walls.