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Here's an article about an architect, Teddy Cruz, who has designed an immigrant community neighborhood in suburban San Diego that incorporates commerce, multi-generations, the changing size and needs of families, and ample public space. His methods are considered new and unusual, though they make perfect sense in a permaculture framework. He's doing some other cool stuff too - like designing the transformation of a 70,000-square-foot McMansion into multifamily housing.
Jennifer
(thanks to Latino Urban Forum for passing this along)
Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal
New York Times: March 12, 2006
select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
TIJUANA, Mexico - Teddy Cruz has been shuttling between suburban San
Diego and the shantytowns of Tijuana for more than a decade now. From
anthropologists to urban planners eager for an insider's view,
visitors pepper him endlessly with requests for tours.
"It's become part of my weekly routine," said Mr. Cruz, a 43-year-old
architect, as we raced along a fenced freeway toward the Mexican
border. "Most people here haven't even seen the border wall. I want
to show people that it's not so ugly."
But Mr. Cruz is more than a tour guide. From London to Tel Aviv to
his own borderland stomping ground here, his ideas about Tijuana's
hardscrabble settlements have generated a buzz. In a patchwork of
plywood hovels, auto repair shops and hasty additions, Mr. Cruz has
found a humane model for rethinking America's suburbs.
He has been pushing that vision as an antidote to the gated
communities that have sprouted from Southern California to Israel to
mainland China in recent years. Ultimately, his ideas could be
applied to the new immigrant suburbs of the Midwest or the flood-
ruined neighborhoods of New Orleans.
Mr. Cruz's growing cult status may have something to do with post-
9/11 realities. As he suggested last year in a talk in London - the
Stirling Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Canadian Center for
Architecture - America's preoccupation with security has refocused
attention on barriers like the 10-foot steel wall between Tijuana and
San Diego. Like many other architects, he sees the border clampdown
as a threat to the kind of cultural exchange that civilizes and
enriches people on both sides.
For Mr. Cruz, the barrier is symptomatic of a mentality that papers
over cultural differences rather than mining them for creative
inspiration. It's the kind of thinking that has fueled the global
boom in gated suburbs, fortified corporate towers and self-contained
shopping enclaves.
"The hardening of the border wall over the past decade coincides with
the hardening of attitudes toward public space," said Mr. Cruz, a
slight man whose gentle manner masks a racing mind. "It is about
policies of exclusion and division. So how do you preserve this
heterogeneity?"
The architect himself has long straddled two cultural realities. He
was reared in the Guatemalan capital, where his mother ran a chic
nightclub. Once arrested for hiding rebel arms in the basement, she
married an American businessman and moved to the United States after
a military coup in the 1980's, settling in San Diego.
Mr. Cruz, then 20, spoke little English; eventually he left to study
architecture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif., and was awarded
the prestigious Rome Prize, an academic fellowship in Italy.
Returning in the early 1990's, he became fixated on an 80-square-mile
area straddling the Mexican border.
"When I came back from Rome I wanted to reconnect to Latin America,"
he said. "I was starting a new family. I started trying to connect
all the dots, to look at the area with a more critical eye. To me,
Tijuana was where the entire continent of Latin America washed up
against this great big wall."
His timing was prescient. After the North American Free Trade
Agreement took effect in 1994, he watched as a ring of new factories
sprang up around Tijuana - enormous blank boxes with trim lawns and
neat rows of palm trees - along with American-style subdivisions with
the rigid regularity of tombstones. Something in him rebelled.
"To me, this was part of an entire history, the kind you always find
in Latin America - continually copying patterns from the West as
symbols of progress," Mr. Cruz said. "In Guatemala, we had an Avenue
de le Reforma, which was a copy of a Mexican boulevard that was a
copy of a typical French 19th-century urban plan. We even had a
miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower."
"These developments are the same," he said of the American-inspired
housing. In Mr. Cruz's view, such projects are a sterile and soulless
counterpoint to Tijuana's labyrinthine ghettos, cobbled from the
residue of a wealthier echelon.
As Tijuana has expanded into the hilly terrain to the east, squatters
have fashioned an elaborate system of retaining walls out of used
tires packed with earth. The houses jostling on the incline are
constructed out of concrete blocks, sheets of corrugated metal, used
garage doors and discarded packing crates - much of it brought down
by local contractors and wholesalers from across the border.
Once such a settlement is completed, it is protected from demolition
under Mexican law - and the government is eventually obliged to
provide plumbing, electricity and roads to serve it. In Mr. Cruz's
view, the process is in some ways a far more flexible and democratic
form of urban development than is the norm elsewhere.
Yet he takes a special delight in places where free-spirited forms
and conventional ones overlap. One of the strangest sights in Tijuana
is a row of vintage California bungalows resting atop a hollow one-
story steel frame. Once destined for demolition across the border,
they were loaded on trucks and brought south by developers who have
sold them to local residents.
To squeeze them into tight lots, many homeowners mount them on frames
so they can use the space underneath for shops, car repair and the
like. On one site, a pretty pink bungalow straddles a narrow driveway
between two existing houses, as if a child were casually stacking toy
houses.
Driving further into the hills, we passed through the gates of a
sprawling subdivision from the late 1990's that has become its own
sort of hybrid. Originally it was conceived as a sprawl of identical
beige houses, each no bigger than a two-car garage, arranged behind
tidy little lawns in a grim version of the American dream.
Only a few years later, the lawns are now cluttered with car repair
shops, grocery stores and taco stands. New floors have been added,
single-family homes have been joined together to house extended
families, and many of the beige facades have been repainted in bright
colors. Mr. Cruz sees the mix as a richer, more vibrant landscape - a
spirited answer to the alienation that many of us associate with
conventional American suburbs.
It's not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and
clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of
Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana's
shantytowns with an open mind, he can extract a viable strategy for
development that is rooted in local traditions.
The fruits are visible in Mr. Cruz's peculiar architectural vision.
For years now he has been refining a design for a 12-unit housing
proposal in San Ysidro, an immigrant community in suburban San Diego,
in cooperation with a local advocacy group known as Casa Familiar.
The design is conceived as a frame for future development, with a
block-long semipublic loggia as its centerpiece.
The loggia will function as a shared communal space for markets,
festivals and other social events. Its concrete frame, partly
inspired by Donald Judd's sculptural cubes, is intentionally purer
and more formal than anything in Tijuana, but that rigorous framework
houses an informal and flexible social organism.
A row of delicate wood housing units on top of the frame will
heighten the contrast between private and public zones. Each unit is
conceived as a series of interlocking rooms that can be broken down
into two one-bedroom units or pieced together for large families. And
the entire site will be bisected by a semipublic garden that connects
West Hall Street to an alleyway that serves as a thoroughfare for
immigrants on their way to work.
A second phase calls for parallel rows of housing for the elderly
interspersed with semipublic gardens. The single-story blocks are
covered by long uniform roofs that tip up at certain points to create
space for what Mr. Cruz calls "prodigal apartments" - single units
where extended family members can stay. A full-time day care center
is also part of the elderly phase, since many immigrant children are
being raised by their grandparents.
To proceed with the project, Mr. Cruz opened a full-scale campaign to
change San Diego's zoning laws. Working with Casa Familiar, he has
sought to open the way for the denser mixed-use communities that are
so typical of Mexico - an urban fabric in which structures bleed
freely into one another, allowing for the shifting realities of
immigrant families. The group's offices will serve as a makeshift
city hall, arranging loans and reconfiguring the units.
The San Diego City Council approved the development plan last year,
and Mr. Cruz expects the zoning changes to go through this fall.
Planners hope to begin construction next year.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cruz is collaborating with the artist Rebecca Solnit
on a theoretical proposal for transforming a 70,000-square-foot
McMansion in suburban San Francisco - built during the dot-com boom -
into multifamily housing. Mr. Cruz believes that grotesquely
overscaled houses across the country will eventually go through a
similar process, although that time could be 50 years away.
"It's the next ring of densification," Mr. Cruz said confidently of
the mega-McMansions, "so we thought it might make a perfect test
case. How do you retrofit them?"
More recently, his emergence from the architectural fringes has
brought him sexier commissions like a writing studio for the urban
critic Mike Davis - the writer calls it his personal shanty - and a
winery in Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico. He has also joined with some
developers in purchasing a small plot of land in Tijuana's
northernmost corner, right against the steel border wall. "It is the
absolute corner of Latin America," he said. "We'd love to turn it
into a cultural center, maybe with a local university."
In some ways Mr. Cruz's earnestness places his architecture outside
the profession, so often myopically obsessed with an aesthetic "wow"
factor. But by focusing his attention narrowly on this border area,
he has created a mutable template that could be applied far beyond
the suburbs of San Diego. For at least a decade now, middle-class
immigrants in the United States have been abandoning the city center
for the older suburbs at the edges of the metropolis. Mr. Cruz sees
these nascent melting pots as a rich laboratory for architectural
experimentation.
For the architect, America's traditional "Our Town" model - pitched
roofs, front porches, town squares - is no more relevant today than
the drearily generic housing blocks of late Modernism. Both visions
assume that we are all alike, that we must all subscribe to the same
vision of utopia.
What Mr. Cruz is arguing for is freedom - and an openness to the
traditions of other cultures. His projects remind us that meaning can
be found in places rooted in a personal experience distinct from our
own.
How far this spirit will move us depends on how much freedom we are
willing to tolerate.
More on Teddy Cruz, some with photos:
www.california-architects.com/con....cfm
www.theboxtank.com/walmartb...new_.html
www.aia.org/cod_lajolla_042404_teddycruz
Jennifer
(thanks to Latino Urban Forum for passing this along)
Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal
New York Times: March 12, 2006
select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
TIJUANA, Mexico - Teddy Cruz has been shuttling between suburban San
Diego and the shantytowns of Tijuana for more than a decade now. From
anthropologists to urban planners eager for an insider's view,
visitors pepper him endlessly with requests for tours.
"It's become part of my weekly routine," said Mr. Cruz, a 43-year-old
architect, as we raced along a fenced freeway toward the Mexican
border. "Most people here haven't even seen the border wall. I want
to show people that it's not so ugly."
But Mr. Cruz is more than a tour guide. From London to Tel Aviv to
his own borderland stomping ground here, his ideas about Tijuana's
hardscrabble settlements have generated a buzz. In a patchwork of
plywood hovels, auto repair shops and hasty additions, Mr. Cruz has
found a humane model for rethinking America's suburbs.
He has been pushing that vision as an antidote to the gated
communities that have sprouted from Southern California to Israel to
mainland China in recent years. Ultimately, his ideas could be
applied to the new immigrant suburbs of the Midwest or the flood-
ruined neighborhoods of New Orleans.
Mr. Cruz's growing cult status may have something to do with post-
9/11 realities. As he suggested last year in a talk in London - the
Stirling Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Canadian Center for
Architecture - America's preoccupation with security has refocused
attention on barriers like the 10-foot steel wall between Tijuana and
San Diego. Like many other architects, he sees the border clampdown
as a threat to the kind of cultural exchange that civilizes and
enriches people on both sides.
For Mr. Cruz, the barrier is symptomatic of a mentality that papers
over cultural differences rather than mining them for creative
inspiration. It's the kind of thinking that has fueled the global
boom in gated suburbs, fortified corporate towers and self-contained
shopping enclaves.
"The hardening of the border wall over the past decade coincides with
the hardening of attitudes toward public space," said Mr. Cruz, a
slight man whose gentle manner masks a racing mind. "It is about
policies of exclusion and division. So how do you preserve this
heterogeneity?"
The architect himself has long straddled two cultural realities. He
was reared in the Guatemalan capital, where his mother ran a chic
nightclub. Once arrested for hiding rebel arms in the basement, she
married an American businessman and moved to the United States after
a military coup in the 1980's, settling in San Diego.
Mr. Cruz, then 20, spoke little English; eventually he left to study
architecture at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif., and was awarded
the prestigious Rome Prize, an academic fellowship in Italy.
Returning in the early 1990's, he became fixated on an 80-square-mile
area straddling the Mexican border.
"When I came back from Rome I wanted to reconnect to Latin America,"
he said. "I was starting a new family. I started trying to connect
all the dots, to look at the area with a more critical eye. To me,
Tijuana was where the entire continent of Latin America washed up
against this great big wall."
His timing was prescient. After the North American Free Trade
Agreement took effect in 1994, he watched as a ring of new factories
sprang up around Tijuana - enormous blank boxes with trim lawns and
neat rows of palm trees - along with American-style subdivisions with
the rigid regularity of tombstones. Something in him rebelled.
"To me, this was part of an entire history, the kind you always find
in Latin America - continually copying patterns from the West as
symbols of progress," Mr. Cruz said. "In Guatemala, we had an Avenue
de le Reforma, which was a copy of a Mexican boulevard that was a
copy of a typical French 19th-century urban plan. We even had a
miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower."
"These developments are the same," he said of the American-inspired
housing. In Mr. Cruz's view, such projects are a sterile and soulless
counterpoint to Tijuana's labyrinthine ghettos, cobbled from the
residue of a wealthier echelon.
As Tijuana has expanded into the hilly terrain to the east, squatters
have fashioned an elaborate system of retaining walls out of used
tires packed with earth. The houses jostling on the incline are
constructed out of concrete blocks, sheets of corrugated metal, used
garage doors and discarded packing crates - much of it brought down
by local contractors and wholesalers from across the border.
Once such a settlement is completed, it is protected from demolition
under Mexican law - and the government is eventually obliged to
provide plumbing, electricity and roads to serve it. In Mr. Cruz's
view, the process is in some ways a far more flexible and democratic
form of urban development than is the norm elsewhere.
Yet he takes a special delight in places where free-spirited forms
and conventional ones overlap. One of the strangest sights in Tijuana
is a row of vintage California bungalows resting atop a hollow one-
story steel frame. Once destined for demolition across the border,
they were loaded on trucks and brought south by developers who have
sold them to local residents.
To squeeze them into tight lots, many homeowners mount them on frames
so they can use the space underneath for shops, car repair and the
like. On one site, a pretty pink bungalow straddles a narrow driveway
between two existing houses, as if a child were casually stacking toy
houses.
Driving further into the hills, we passed through the gates of a
sprawling subdivision from the late 1990's that has become its own
sort of hybrid. Originally it was conceived as a sprawl of identical
beige houses, each no bigger than a two-car garage, arranged behind
tidy little lawns in a grim version of the American dream.
Only a few years later, the lawns are now cluttered with car repair
shops, grocery stores and taco stands. New floors have been added,
single-family homes have been joined together to house extended
families, and many of the beige facades have been repainted in bright
colors. Mr. Cruz sees the mix as a richer, more vibrant landscape - a
spirited answer to the alienation that many of us associate with
conventional American suburbs.
It's not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and
clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of
Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana's
shantytowns with an open mind, he can extract a viable strategy for
development that is rooted in local traditions.
The fruits are visible in Mr. Cruz's peculiar architectural vision.
For years now he has been refining a design for a 12-unit housing
proposal in San Ysidro, an immigrant community in suburban San Diego,
in cooperation with a local advocacy group known as Casa Familiar.
The design is conceived as a frame for future development, with a
block-long semipublic loggia as its centerpiece.
The loggia will function as a shared communal space for markets,
festivals and other social events. Its concrete frame, partly
inspired by Donald Judd's sculptural cubes, is intentionally purer
and more formal than anything in Tijuana, but that rigorous framework
houses an informal and flexible social organism.
A row of delicate wood housing units on top of the frame will
heighten the contrast between private and public zones. Each unit is
conceived as a series of interlocking rooms that can be broken down
into two one-bedroom units or pieced together for large families. And
the entire site will be bisected by a semipublic garden that connects
West Hall Street to an alleyway that serves as a thoroughfare for
immigrants on their way to work.
A second phase calls for parallel rows of housing for the elderly
interspersed with semipublic gardens. The single-story blocks are
covered by long uniform roofs that tip up at certain points to create
space for what Mr. Cruz calls "prodigal apartments" - single units
where extended family members can stay. A full-time day care center
is also part of the elderly phase, since many immigrant children are
being raised by their grandparents.
To proceed with the project, Mr. Cruz opened a full-scale campaign to
change San Diego's zoning laws. Working with Casa Familiar, he has
sought to open the way for the denser mixed-use communities that are
so typical of Mexico - an urban fabric in which structures bleed
freely into one another, allowing for the shifting realities of
immigrant families. The group's offices will serve as a makeshift
city hall, arranging loans and reconfiguring the units.
The San Diego City Council approved the development plan last year,
and Mr. Cruz expects the zoning changes to go through this fall.
Planners hope to begin construction next year.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cruz is collaborating with the artist Rebecca Solnit
on a theoretical proposal for transforming a 70,000-square-foot
McMansion in suburban San Francisco - built during the dot-com boom -
into multifamily housing. Mr. Cruz believes that grotesquely
overscaled houses across the country will eventually go through a
similar process, although that time could be 50 years away.
"It's the next ring of densification," Mr. Cruz said confidently of
the mega-McMansions, "so we thought it might make a perfect test
case. How do you retrofit them?"
More recently, his emergence from the architectural fringes has
brought him sexier commissions like a writing studio for the urban
critic Mike Davis - the writer calls it his personal shanty - and a
winery in Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico. He has also joined with some
developers in purchasing a small plot of land in Tijuana's
northernmost corner, right against the steel border wall. "It is the
absolute corner of Latin America," he said. "We'd love to turn it
into a cultural center, maybe with a local university."
In some ways Mr. Cruz's earnestness places his architecture outside
the profession, so often myopically obsessed with an aesthetic "wow"
factor. But by focusing his attention narrowly on this border area,
he has created a mutable template that could be applied far beyond
the suburbs of San Diego. For at least a decade now, middle-class
immigrants in the United States have been abandoning the city center
for the older suburbs at the edges of the metropolis. Mr. Cruz sees
these nascent melting pots as a rich laboratory for architectural
experimentation.
For the architect, America's traditional "Our Town" model - pitched
roofs, front porches, town squares - is no more relevant today than
the drearily generic housing blocks of late Modernism. Both visions
assume that we are all alike, that we must all subscribe to the same
vision of utopia.
What Mr. Cruz is arguing for is freedom - and an openness to the
traditions of other cultures. His projects remind us that meaning can
be found in places rooted in a personal experience distinct from our
own.
How far this spirit will move us depends on how much freedom we are
willing to tolerate.
More on Teddy Cruz, some with photos:
www.california-architects.com/con....cfm
www.theboxtank.com/walmartb...new_.html
www.aia.org/cod_lajolla_042404_teddycruz
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