Architecture and Design Network (ADN) continues its 2019/2020 June Freeman lecture series with a lecture entitled “Borderwall as Architecure” with Virginia San Fratello, founding partner of Real San Fratello.

The program will begin at 6pm tonight (January 14) following a 5:30pm reception at the Windgate Center for Art+Design on the UA Little Rock campus.

San Fratello draws, builds, 3D prints, teaches, and writes about architecture and interior design as a cultural endeavor deeply influenced by craft traditions and contemporary technologies.  She is a founding partner in the Oakland based make-tank Emerging Objects. Wired magazine writes of their innovations, “while others busy themselves trying to prove that it’s possible to 3-D print a house, Rael and San Fratello are occupied with trying to design one people would actually want to live in”.

She also speculates about the social agency of design, particularly along the borderlands between the USA and Mexico, in her studio RAEL SAN FRATELLO. You can see her drawings, models, and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Virginia San Fratello will discuss the long-term project, Borderwall as Architecture, an important re-examination of what the 700 miles of physical barrier that divides the United States of America from the United Mexican States is, and could be. It is both a protest against the wall and a projection about its future. She will present a series of propositions suggesting that the nearly seven hundred miles of wall is an opportunity for cultural and social development along the border that encourages its conceptual and physical dismantling, the lecture will take the audience on a journey along a wall that cuts through a “third nation” — the Divided States of America.

On the way the transformative effects of the wall on people, animals, and the natural and built landscape are exposed and interrogated through the story of people who, on both sides of the border, transform the wall, challenging its existence in remarkably creative ways. Coupled with these real-life accounts are counterproposals for the wall, created by Virginia’s studio, that reimagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance, and meaning. Virginia proposes that despite the intended use of the wall, which is to keep people out and away, the wall is instead an attractor, engaging both sides in a common dialogue.

ADN lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.  Thank you to our presenting sponsor Malmstrom White and our title sponsors Terracon and Evo Business Environments. Supporters of ADN include the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the University of Arkansas Little Rock Windgate Center of Art + Design, the Central Section of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Art Center and friends in the community.  For additional information contact  ArchDesignNetwork@gmail.com.