Two Bay Area professors create seesaw at border wall.

2 Bay Area professors create seesaw at border so kids in U.S., Mexico can play together

It may seem like an ordinary scene: Children and adults playing on pink seesaws, carelessly laughing and chatting with one another.

But this is a playground unlike any other. Custombuilt seesaws have been placed on both sides of a slatted steel border fence that separates the United States and Mexico.

The idea for a “TeeterTotter Wall” came from Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San Jose State University — and it was a long time coming.

In 2009, the two designed a concept for a binational seesaw at the border for a book, “Borderwall as Architecture,” which uses “humor and inventiveness to address the futility of building barriers,” according to UC Berkeley.

Ten years later, their conceptual drawings became a reality. Rael and his crew transported the seesaws to Sunland Park, New Mexico, separated by a steel fence from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

The New Mexico town is also where a militia detained migrants this year and where a private group built its own border wall using millions of dollars raised in a GoFundMe campaign.

But along another stretch of the border in Sunland Park on Monday, the scene was dramatically different.

People from both sides came together to play in a “unifying act,” UC Berkeley said in a statement. Participants on the Mexico side were not involved in the planning, according to the statement.

In an Instagram post, Rael said the event was “filled with joy, excitement and togetherness at the border wall.”

“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.

Rael says that counterproposals for the wall created by his studio “reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance and meaning,” according to the book’s website.

CHRISTIAN CHAVEZ — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A mother and her baby play on a seesaw installed between the steel fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Sunday. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley.

LUIS TORRES — GETTY IMAGES A group of American families plays with a seesaw toy called Up and Down with a Mexican child.

LUIS TORRES — GETTY IMAGES A Mexican soldier walks in front of American and Mexican families playing with seesaws.