CNN)It may seem like an ordinary scene: Children and adults playing on pink seesaws, carelessly laughing and chatting with each other
But this is a playground unlike any other. These custom-built seesaws have been placed on both sides of a slatted steel border fence that separates the United States and Mexico.
The idea for a “Teeter-Totter Wall” came from Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of design at San Jose State University — and it was a long time coming.
In 2009, the two designed a concept for a binational seesaw at the border for a book, “Borderwall as Architecture,” which uses “humor and inventiveness to address the futility of building barriers,” UC-Berkeley said.
Ten years later, their conceptual drawings became reality. Rael and his crew transported the seesaws to Sunland Park, New Mexico, separated by a steel fence from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The New Mexico town is also where a militia detained migrants this year and where a private group built its own border wall using millions of dollars raised in a GoFundMe campaign.
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