Border seesaws win Bay Area professors international award

A woman with her little girls helps them play seesaw installed between the border fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, Sunday, July 28, 2019. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture in California. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez)
Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, and his wife Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San Jose State, are photographed at Printfarm, their lab in Berkeley, Calif., in 2018. Both have won the 2020 Beazley Design of the Year award from the Design Museum in London. Their installation of bright pink seesaws along the U.S.-Mexican border allowed children from both countries to play together in the shadow of a border wall. (Photo by Logman Arja)
Members of the Mexican military police wearing the insignia of the new National Guard check children and people as they play seesaw installed between the border fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, Sunday, July 28, 2019. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture in California. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez)
A child plays seesaw installed between the border fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, Sunday, July 28, 2019. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture in California. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez)
AP Photo/Christian Chavez
A mother and her baby play on a seesaw installed between the steel fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, on July 28, 2019. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley.
(University of California via CNN)

By Joan Morris | jmorris@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: January 22, 2021 at 1:47 p.m. | UPDATED: January 27, 2021 at 3:46 a.m.

An installation of bright pink seesaws along the U.S.-Mexican border that allowed children from both countries to play together in the shadow of a border wall, has won the Bay Area professors who designed the project a prestigious award.

Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San Jose State, and her husband, Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, have won the 2020 Beazley Design of the Year award from the Design Museum in London.

Ronald Rael, professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, and his wife Virginia San Fratello, associate professor of design at San Jose State, are photographed at Printfarm, their lab in Berkeley, Calif., in 2018. Both have won the 2020 Beazley Design of the Year award from the Design Museum in London. Their installation of bright pink seesaws along the U.S.-Mexican border allowed children from both countries to play together in the shadow of a border wall. (Photo by Logman Arja)

The museum’s annual awards recognize projects that have made a real-world impact in the areas of digital, fashion, graphic and product design as well as transport and architecture. Rael and Fratello’s work was considered among 74 shortlisted projects that included Tik Tok’s viral Renegade dance, edible drink capsules that replaced plastic bottles at the London Marathon, and a 3D graphic of the coronavirus particle.

The “Teeter-Totter Wall,” a binational seesaw at the border, originally was a conceptional design for Rael’s 2009 book, “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary.” The book has been described as an “intellectual hand grenade,” and “a timely re-examination of what the 650 miles of physical barrier … is, and could be.”

A woman with her little girls helps them play seesaw installed between the border fence that divides Mexico from the United States in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico, Sunday, July 28, 2019. The seesaw was designed by Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture in California. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez)

With then-President Donald Trump’s drive to erect a wall along the nation’s southern border with Mexico, the teeter totter wall jumped off the pages and into reality. In 2019 the pink seesaws were taken to Sunland Park, New Mexico, an impoverished border town where a private group built its own border wall using millions of dollars raised in a GoFundMe drive, separating Sunland Park from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

The day of the installation, children and adults from both sides came together to play in what was described as a “unifying act.”

Rael said in an Instagram post that the event was “filled with joy, excitement, and togetherness at the borderwall.”

“The wall became a literal fulcrum for U.S.-Mexico relations and children and adults were connected in meaningful ways on both sides with the recognition that the actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side,” he wrote.

San Fratello and Rael said they hoped the work would encourage people to build bridges in communities, not walls.