Life on the Border: Case Study Presentation

Please join graduate architecture students for a case study presentation from their course "Life on the Border: The Architecture of The Trans-Boundary Urban Space," taught by German Pallares, PhD Candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture.

This seminar started by understanding borders as geographies of conflict that transcend physical and political divisions. These inherently systemic, territorial, and cultural landscapes have been historically disturbed, and many times radically altered by political forces, resulting in situations of confrontation. By acknowledging the role of designers as border-making agents, this seminar critically assessed state and institutional control over the built environment; how projective tools like maps, plans, signage, and patterns of use can act as operative forces for alienation, segregation, division, violence and surveillance, but also the post-border potential of an architecture of connection, communication, and collaboration.

For the final project each student developed a research on a particular border landscape into a cartographic-diagram that mapped it´s local conditions and their connections to the global environment. The students were encouraged to find case studies where the divided territory presented a political, cultural, ethnical, ideological, or economical conflict and how the built environment was responding to it. Case studies include: The mistaken identities in Trieste, the dichotomy between two ideologies in the Xiamen-Kinmen border, racial segregation in Kuwait’s Jeleeb Alshuyoukh neighborhood, the transborder space between Hong Kong and China, the Chamizal moving waters conflict and resolution, climate change and its impact in the Arctic circle, the dispute over Diaoyu/Senkaku sslands, Crimea’s dueling cultures, and the dispute in South China sea.

The exhibition will be on dispaly on the Mezzanine level of Meyerson Hall.