The Total Wall
The ultimate wall for the Mexico-US border
Date 2016
Location El Paso, Mexico
Type Competition
Program Border Wall
Project team Santiago Miret and Melisa Brieva
Since mankind has settled in a territory he has built walls. Some of them, the ancients, we don´t even know why they were erected. But all of them have significations associated. Some were meant to protect cities, others delimitated sacred places, others were symbols of power, other were strictly political send messages to the most important spheres of world power. The truth is that the Architecture embedded in each one of them is particular and they constitute an inevitable research material. Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Peruvians, all of them built walls with differentiated styles and functions.
This wall is political, religious, military, socio-cultural, imperialist, conqueror, multi-programmatic, governmental, ceremonial, of containment. Is a wall made with a lot of walls. History is repeating itself. The never ending of human civilization against human civilization. It is a xenophobic wall, anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, dictatorial, fascist, religious fanatic, consumerist, perverse, villainous. A bastard wall, orphan, incestuous, adulterous, pedophile, necrophile. The present investigation is in the search of the walls that ever existed, in order to extract from them their inner intelligence to combine them in one. The great, final, total wall will end with the man itself as we know it. History repeats itself, but this time is the most horrendous of all. All lies and truths reunite in The Total Wall.