This TED Talk features architecture professor Ronald Rael recorded live at TED Salon

Belonging 2018.

This talk is highly visual. Watch it now on TED.com.

Isn't it fascinating how the simple act of drawing a line on the map can transform the way we see and experience the

world, and how those spaces in between lines, borders, become places. They become places where

language and food and music and people of different cultures rub against each other in beautiful and sometimes violent

and occasionally really ridiculous ways.

And those lines drawn on a map can actually create scars in the landscape,

and they can create scars in our memories.

My interest in borders came about when I was searching for an architecture of the borderlands.

And I was working on several projects along the U.S.-Mexical border, designing buildings made out of mud

taken right from the ground. And I also work on projects that you might say immigrated to this

landscape, Prada Marfa, a land art sculpture, that crosses the border between art and architecture.

And it demonstrated to me that architecture could communicate ideas that were much more politically and culturally complex, that architecture could be satirical and serious at the same time, and it could speak to the disparities

between wealth and poverty and what's local and what's foreign.

And so in my search for an architecture of the borderlands,

I began to wonder, is the wall architecture?

I begin to document my thoughts and visits to the wall by creating a series of souvenirs

to remind us of the time when we built a wall, and what a crazy idea that was.

I created border games, postcards, snow globes with little architectural models inside of them,

and maps that told the story of resilience at the wall and sought for ways that design could bring to light the problems that the border wall was creating.

So is the wall architecture?

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