Lateral Office's proposal "Banking on the Border" is featured in the exhibition entitled "Drylands Design" at the Architecture + Design Museum, Los Angeles, CA. It runs March 22 - April 26, 2012.

Banking on the Border imagines an intermittent ‘wet’ border between the US and Mexico formed of water collection and treatment, water banks and water markets, to produce new landscapes and public realms. In some instances, water banks are paired with current border crossings, shifting from border control to border exchange / cooperation. Beyond simply storing new water sources, Banking on the Border posits that making water legible and public is the first step towards both individual and collective action, conservation, while producing new landscapes, new public realms, and new sites of economic exchange.

DRYLANDS DESIGN will feature work by architects, landscape architects, engineers, and urban designers responding to the challenges of water scarcity in the face of climate change. With a focus on the US West, the exhibition will presents a portfolio of adaptive strategies large and small, rural and urban, high tech and low-carbon. Since no single solution will meet the complex needs of the US West, the exhibition will explore a range of approaches for how buildings and parks, houses and streets, industry and agriculture, cities and neighborhoods might be adapted to face a drought-prone future. DRYLANDS DESIGN will recognize water scarcity as an issue of global concern, and challenges the industrialized world to take a leadership position with water-conserving, low-carbon design innovation for its own backyard.

More information on the exhibition is here: http://aplusd.org/exhibitions-current