South of Texas

The fence, to be built in 21 segments at strategic points along the Rio Grande, must be able to withstand a crash by a 10,000-pound (4,545-kg) vehicle traveling at 40 miles per hour (64 kph), but also be “aesthetically pleasing,” the agency said.

The wall is part of a federal plan to build 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The border protection agency said the wall would mostly be built on river levees, but also would cross private land and encroach on state parks and the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge is considered one of the most biologically diverse wildlife sanctuaries in the nation and environmentalists say the fence could harm endangered species such as ocelots and jaguarundi found there.

Many local leaders in southern Texas, which is heavily Hispanic and has strong economic and cultural ties to Mexico, have criticized the border wall as unnecessary and an affront to Mexicans.

Still, the architects of the US – Mexico Wall hope it would change society. The result are towns divided in two without regard for prior form or use.

Texas Border Fence Map II

Over time, the Wall evolved from fences to concrete “jersey walls” with steel mesh in South of Texas. The final form would be a Wall, constructed from 15 to 20 feet high, separated by a no-man’s-land as wide as 1 mile .  The Wall is capped by a smooth pipe, making it difficult to scale and is accompanied by trenches as well as “Normandy” vehicle fence consisting of steel beams fencing set in concrete. Also, tower-based integrated cameras and sensors, ground-based radar and mobile surveillance systems.

Border Life "La Linea"

It may succeed in changing society, but as with most modernist products, not in the way its builders intended. By providing a datum line for the US, the Wall gave meaning to the lives of its inhabitants. As the Wall was being constructed , situationists in the US and elsewhere are advocating for radical changes in cities as a means of preserving urban life.

In his 1972 thesis at the Architectural Association, entitled “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” Rem Koolhaas found a way of reconciling modernism with Situationism through the figure of the Berlin Wall. Suggesting that the Wall might be exported to London and made to encircle it, Koolhaas writes, “The inhabitants of this architecture, those strong enough to love it, would become its Voluntary Prisoners, ecstatic in the freedom of their architectural confines.” Inside, life would be “a continuous state of ornamental frenzy and decorative delirium, an overdose of symbols.” Although officially proposing a way of making London more interesting, Koolhaas’s thesis is really a set of observations about the already existing condition of the real Wall. In choosing to encircle London with the Wall, Koolhaas recognized that it was not only the last great product of modernism, it was the last work of heavy architecture. Already in 1966, in his introduction to 40 Under 40, Robert Stern observed that an increasingly dematerialized “cardboard architecture”  was “the order of the day”  in the United States while in England, architects such as Archigram were proposing barrier-less technological utopias.

Palomas - Arizona

Built of concrete and steel, the US – Mexico wall is solid, weighty. It hearkened back to the days of the medieval city walls, which were not only defensive but attempted to organize and contain a world progressively more interconnected through communications and trade.

Walls acts as concentrators, defining places in which early capitalism and urbanity could be found and intensifying both. So long as the modes of communication remained physical and the methods of making and trading goods were slow, nations retained their authority and autonomy through architectural solidity.