The Portmanteau competition entry, 2018 ACSA Conference

Wridge

Paula Allen & Alix Henry

They came to the broken place of the world, and taken all together, they did not have enough items to fill a carry-on bag.

Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway

Risk This project challenges the notion that winners and losers are complimentary inverses by proposing a new notion of play wherein the imperative is that the game produce only winners. Some play for survival, others play for opportunity. The stakes couldn’t be higher as risking your life is the cost for a place at the table.

w(all) + (b)ridge = wridge Wridge rises along the most deadly stretch of border between Mexico and the United States. It is a participatory collaboration of heterogeneous authors and complementary interests that converge at a politicized line of demarcation with the intent to provoke new mappings of possibility. It challenges, subverts, and neutralizes the politically charged border wall by reimagining it as a bridge; an architectural intervention, formed as a ridge and programmatically organized to create humanitarian, cultural, and economic possibilities.

The object is to turn a zone of conflict into a seedbed for coalition. Wridge is pathway—a fluid and transitional community that grows and retreats according to need and through the participation of its benefactors. It is self-sustaining, harvesting water, growing food, producing energy and treating waste. And it is generative, providing a point of contact between the weary and respite, between the able and remuneration, between hope and possibility. In the space between, life unfolds like a portmanteau ready to be unpacked and filled up.