Borderwall Urbanism

Wednesday, 09/20/17
494 Wurster Hall

“Borderwall Urbanism”
Ronald Rael, Associate Professor, Architecture, UC Berkeley
Stephanie Syjuco, Assistant Professor, Art Practice, UC Berkeley
Wednesday, September 20, 12:00-1:30pm
Cal Design Lab, Wurster 494, Wurster Hall

There are fourteen major sister cities along the United States - Mexico border whose urban, cultural, and ecological networks have been bifurcated by a borderwall. With 650 miles of wall already constructed, and the population in these urban areas expected to grow to over 20 million inhabitants over the next decade, the long-term effects of the wall’s construction must be carefully considered now in order to anticipate the consequences of its incision into a context of rapid growth and massive migratory flows, especially as the current political climate calls for further wall construction.

Associate Professor Ronald Rael is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and the Chair of the Masters of Architecture Committee. He directs the printFARM Laboratory (print Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials), holds a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture, in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice, and is both a Bakar and Hellman Fellow. His teaching spans the curriculum, from graduate design thesis, undergraduate courses on Design & Activism, and he has twice directed the one year post-professional Master of Architecture program, Studio One.

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, n order to investigate issues of economies and empire. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2010 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA/P.S.1, SFMOMA, The California Biennial, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Frieze Projects London, and others. At Berkeley she teaches classes in sculpture, social practice and experimental media, with a focus on public interventions and material culture.