U.S. President Donald Trump has been reticent about the details of his proposed "big, beautiful wall" on the border with Mexico. While the idea has been shredded from every direction, and even by some Republicans, it has inspired one Miami architecture studio to design a sustainable version. You're going to need to sit down for this one...
DOMO Design Studios released their take on the wall, which would use 750,000 "surplus" shipping containers to create a sustainable, functional wall which blends into the environment. The studio says that this is a more "balanced" and "positive" approach.
"By removing the idea of a wall or a fence, we remove the negative social, cultural, and physical connotations associated with visual and physical barriers. As stewards of the land, our proposal is sustainable, and aims to blend into nature while maintaining functionality," said DOMO.
This wall design would feature negative spaces (basically instead of a wall in the conventional sense, a deep furrow would be dug into the ground so that a person standing on one end of it could still maintain eye contact with another person standing on the other side) in places, and public spaces and housing units in urban areas.
In an interview with Politico Magazine, principal architect Francisco Llado said, "One of our goals was to not be like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall or any of those typologies that represent division. "Our design is not about division but about unity of sense and sustainable functionality."
Quite how a more pretty version of Trump's wall drives "unity of sense" is never made clear in the interview or in any of the studio's literature on this idea, though the architects do use the word "sustainable" a lot.