John Beckmann would like to start the conversation over.

Earlier this month, using the usual channels, he began to promote the design contest that he is managing: Building the Border Wall. That would be the border wall, the one that Republican presidential candidate and frontrunner Donald Trump proposes to build along the entire border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The response from the design community was swift—and harsh. ArchDaily, a site that hosts the go-to bulletin board for the architecture field, appended several urgent updates to the competition announcement before yanking it. Commenters called it a bad joke. Architecture Twitter rebelled.

“We’re going to change the title to ‘Building the Border Wall’—question mark—competition,” Beckmanntells CityLab. ... “There’s obviously a real problem. We’re trying to encourage an open competition—it could be architects, designers, sculptors, artists, conceptual artists, activists, you name it—to re-conceptualize the border itself,” Beckmann says. “We’re politically neutral on the subject.”

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Is anyone supposed to take this design contest seriously? Absolutely, Beckmann says. He says the cash prize is legit ($5,000, which will be subsidized by the contest’s $50 entrance fee). The jury will be real, too, although he didn’t name any confirmed members. It’s like any other design contest, he says: The goal is to get people talking.

At least 34 entrants have registered so far, he says. Given the implausibility of building an actual border wall, and the rollout of this contest—including revisions made Tuesday to make it a little less partisan-seeming—some of those submissions may prove to be less than traditional. Beckmann is counting on it.

“We’re not encouraging people to build the wall. We’re not saying you’ve got to complete the wall. We’re not saying to take down the wall,” Beckmann says. “We’re just trying to set up a venue for people to rethink the wall, to rethink the border situation.”