Winter 2019
M.Arch Thesis
University of British Columbia
This project investigates the power of ritual and infrastructure at the US-Mexico border, where thousands of asylum seekers have overwhelmed an ill-equipped immigration system and are forced to wait in Mexico for months for the opportunity to present themselves at a port of entry.
Operating within the realities of sheltering and processing large volumes of people the project navigates between several tensions: utopia and dystopia, tradition and modernity, human and machine, freedom and confinement.
Set in the bi-national conurbation of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the project juggles the competing goals of the actors in the region to propose an infrastructure that facilitates rituals for the passage of time and rituals for the passage of people over the border.
