The Teeter-Totter Wall has been picked by London’s Design Museum as the winner of the Beazley Designs of the Year
A temporary installation comprising three pink seesaws along the US-Mexico border – slotted through the steel boundary slats – conceived by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, and art collective Colectivo Chopeke, has been named the winner of the Beazley Designs of the Year by the Design Museum in London.
Teeter-Totter Wall – ten years in the making – allowed children in El Paso, Texas, and from the Anapra community in Juárex, Mexico, to play with each other, bringing them together as neighbours and friends, ‘in an attempt to create unity at the politically divisive border’.
The pink seesaws only lasted for 20 minutes, although footage of the project went viral online. Design Museum director Tim Marlow praised the project for how ‘it encouraged new ways of human connection and struck a chord that continues to resonate far beyond El Paso in the USA and Juárez in Mexico.’
‘It remains an inventive and poignant reminder of how human beings can transcend the forces that seek to divide us.’
