‘Borderwall as Architecture’ Author Next IBC Keynote Series Speaker Nov. 28

Imagine the U.S./México border as a place to convene. That’s what author and architect Ronald Rael suggests in his book, “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S./México Boundary.”

A lecture based on his book is the topic of Rael’s upcoming lecture for the International Bank of Commerce 2017-2018 Keynote Speaker Series at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the Student Center (SC) Ballroom.

Admission is free and open to the public.

A reception will start at 7 p.m. in the SC second floor rotunda.

The Speaker Series is presented by the TAMIU A. R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade and sponsored by IBC Bank.

In his “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-México Boundary” (University of California Press 2017), Rael advocates for a reconsideration of the barrier dividing the U.S. and México through design proposals that are hyperboles of actual scenarios which have occurred as a consequence of the wall. It is a timely re-examination of what the physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is and could be.

He proposes suggestions for economic and social development for the nearly 700 miles of wall already built. Raels’s counterproposals for the wall, created by his studio, reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance and meaning.

Rael, associate professor of architecture, Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture and Chair of the Master’s of Architecture Committee, University of California, Berkeley, 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 and undergraduate courses on design to activism, and he has twice directed the one year prost-professional Master of Architecture program, Studio One.

For more information, contact Amy Palacios, associate director, Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade, at 326.2820 or amy@tamiu.edu or visit offices in Western Hemispheric Trade Center, room 221.

University office hours are 8 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday – Friday.