... The competition in question—“Building the Border Wall?”—has stirred up considerable debate since launching in early March. When architectural news website ArchDaily.com posted a call for entries, some wondered whether the competition was a joke. Architect Fabrizio Gallanti called for a boycott of ArchDaily, and demanded the cancelation of the competition itself. Many others, including the architecture competition site Bustler, questioned the ethics of sharing and participating in a competition that seemed to promote xenophobia.

The Third Mind Foundation—a group of “architects, designers, and artists who wish to remain anonymous,” according to its website—is sponsoring the competition. It stated in the original challenge: “Design a barrier of architectural merit that is realistically priced to build and made of materials that will not only be effective in keeping out waves of illegal immigration, but that will also be relatively inexpensive to maintain.” On the jury page, a panel composed of deceased luminaries such as Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks, John F. Kennedy, and Buckminster Fuller presides, further confusing matters.

Reacting to the criticism, the Third Mind Foundation added the question mark to its competition title and made several changes to the brief. The competition now asks designers “to bring creativity and innovation to bear on the idea of a border barrier.” It also asks, “If not a fence or wall, then what? Can the idea of a wall be combined with architectural activism?” Third Mind also clarified, “We take no position on this issue. We remain politically neutral.” 

John Beckmann, a New York-based designer who is the chief organizer of the competition and a liaison for the Third Mind Foundation, was perplexed by the controversy. “Our goal is to create positive humanitarian strategies that propose ideas that move beyond a simplistic binary—build a wall, don’t build a wall, Republican vs. Democrat, United States vs. Mexico—to move to a higher level of discourse here because either notion is very simplistic,” he said. When asked about the controversial language of the original design challenge and the decision to launch the competition without a jury, Beckmann explained that both had been matters of expediency, saying, “We wanted to be the first on this. Second isn’t really interesting.”

Beckmann freely admitted that none of the competition’s organizers had visited the border region or seriously researched the issue in preparation for this competition. “But I don’t think that invalidates the idea or notion that a group of people can propose a competition,” he said. Beyond a list of the technical challenges involved in the construction of such a wall, Third Mind makes no mention of the cities, towns, and communities living along the border. ....