The L.A. Times’ Christopher Knight worked hard to convince the Border Patrol that he should be able to see the wall prototypes – and that an architecture critic’s experience and expertise were relevant. But once he got there, he says, “my critical instincts seemed divided against themselves. The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one.”