TEDDY CRUZ

ÝMÇ

Teddy Cruz is a Guatemalan-born architect (b.1962), whose work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory. Teddy Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Archilab in Orleans, France, the Architectural Biennials of Rotterdam and Lisbon and most recently at the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2004-2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics, and is currently an associate professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.

Manufactured Sites

1. Tijuana / San Diego Trans-Border Flows:
The most trafficked border in the world is mainly characterized by a series of illegal ‘off the radar’ two-way border crossings. While ‘human flow’ mobilizes Northbound in search for Dollars, ‘infrastructural waste’ moves in the opposite direction to construct an insurgent, cross-border urbanism of emergency.
2. Tijuana, a City of Factories:
Taking advantage of NAFTA generated free economic zones, Large Maquiladora (assembly) factories position themselves in close proximity with the emerging slums in Tijuana in order to easily extract cheap labor from these informal settlements.
3. NAFTA (North American FAIR Trade Agreement): Labor = Housing
Can the Maquiladora industry contribute with its own logics and processes of prefabrication to produce surplus, micro-infrastructural support systems that can reinforce the transitional, informal housing environments that dot the periphery of Tijuana?
4. A Housing Urbanism Made of Waste
A Maquiladora-produced prefabricated frame acts as a hinge mechanism to mediate across the multiplicity of recycled materials and systems brought from San Diego and re-assembled in Tijuana. Without compromising the temporal dynamics of these self-made environments, this micro-infrastructure is the first step in the construction of a larger, interwoven scaffold that can help strengthen an otherwise precarious terrain. By bridging between the planned and the unplanned, the legal and the illegal, the object and the ground, as well as man-made and factory processes of construction this frame questions the meaning of manufacturing and of housing in the context of building community.