|
CONFLICT RESOLUTION -
Teddy Cruz and Pedro Reyes
List of Works by Teddy Cruz:
Radicalizing the Local: SixtyMiles of Transborder Urban Conflict, 2008
Vinyl wallpaper
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz
A newly reconstituted global border between the first and third worlds is reemerging as societies of overproduction and excess are barricading themselves in, in an unprecedented way, against the sectors of scarcity produced out of political and economic indifference. The border zones along the post-9/11 “political equator” are the sites at which the forces of division and control produced by these global zones of conflict are amplified, physically inscribed, and locally manifested, producing, in turn, new and local zones of conflict.
The international border between the US and Mexico at the San Diego–Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately sixty million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. A sixty-linear-mile cross section, tangential to the border wall, between these two cities compresses the most dramatic issues currently challenging normative notions of architecture and urbanism. This transborder “cut” begins thirty miles north of the border, in the periphery of San Diego, and ends thirty miles south of the border. Found along this trajectory is a series of collisions, critical junctures, and confl icts between artifi cial and natural ecologies, top-down development and bottom-up organization.
Practice Diagram / Statement, 2008
Vinyl
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz
Practice Diagram is an illustration of the practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz. The border region between Tijuana and San Diego, where Cruz lives and works, is a kind of laboratory through which the current politics of migration, labor, and surveillance can be reflected—the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms, and the incremental division of the territory into enclaves of megawealth and the sectors of poverty that surround them.
The main intention has been to “radicalize” this border region in order to make possible new critical readings of globalization. In other words, as global conflict touches the ground, it produces local conflict. An inspiration for Cruz’s work has been the exposure of conflict as the main operational instrument to redefine architectural practice.
McMansion Retrofitted, 2008
Plastic model, pedestal with mirrors, and two videos
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz
In the last few decades, millions of Latin American migrants have journeyed north in the hope of participating in one of the most robust economies in the world, California’s. Their hopes are based on a supply-and-demand logic: the California economy, powerful though it is, depends on their cheap labor. This north-bound Latin American diaspora inevitably alters and transforms the fabric of San Diego’s subdivisions. In these neighborhoods, multigenerational or “extended” families shape their own programs of use, taking charge of their own microeconomies in order to maintain a standard for their households and generating nonconforming uses and high densities that reshape the\ fabric of the residential neighborhoods where they settle. Alternative social spaces begin to spring up in large parking lots; informal economies such as flea markets and street vendors appear in vacant properties; and housing additions in the shape of illegal companion units are plugged into existing suburban dwellings to provide affordable living.
The areas of San Diego that have been most impacted by this nonconforming urbanism are concentrated in its first ring of suburbanization. At a moment when developers and city officials are still focusing on two main areas of development—on one end, the redevelopment and gentrifi cation of the downtown area and, on the other, the increasingly expansive suburban sprawl resulting from an equally high-priced real estate project supported by an oilhungry infrastructure—it is the older neighborhoods of San Diego’s midcity that remain depressed and ignored. It is here in the fi rst ring of suburbanization that immigrants have been settling in recent years, unable to afford the high rents of the downtown area’s luxury condos or the expensive “McMansions” of the new suburbs, though providing cheap labor for both.
As the shifting of cultural demographics in the midcity has transformed many of these neighborhoods into sites for investigation, Estudio Teddy Cruz’s research has focused on and been inspired by the impact of immigration on the transformation of the American neighborhood.
|
|
|
McMansion Retrofitted, 2008
Plastic model, pedestal with mirrors, and two videos
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz
Mapping Nonconformity, 2008
Video triptych
a) Compendium of Voids: A Chronology of an Invasion
b) Levittown Retrofi tted: Nonconforming Buddha
c) An Urbanism 70 Feet Deep: The Tunnel House
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz
The institutions of representation across government, academia, and development have not been able to critically observe and translate the meaning of the shifting socioeconomic and cultural forces that are transforming the contemporary city. The offi cial documentation of land use at most city agencies has systematically ignored the nonconforming and selforganizing dynamics of the environments they regulate by continuing to advocate a false binary land-use convention based on abstract information rendered at the planners’ table (retail areas are represented in red as discretely separated out from, or safely located adjacent to, housing areas in yellow). When one maps the real land use in those neighborhoods, examining them parcel by parcel, block by block, there are at least ten possible zones, reflecting the gradation of use and scale of the diverse social composition and nonconforming small businesses. One also finds a more threedimensional form of zoning based not on adjacencies but on juxtapositions, as dormant infrastructures are transformed into usable spaces. In other words, the appropriation and negotiation of public and private boundaries remain anathema to conventional code regulation, which ignores the potentialities that stealth urbanism can open up.
Estudio Teddy Cruz is interested in challenging these conventions of urban cartography in order to utilize the ambiguities and complexities that such stealth urbanism makes available. Essential to this project is the construction of maps that alter official modes of representations of the city. What do we mean by density, land use, and housing? Official land-use maps regularly fail to include the mutation of public and private boundaries, the “illegal pixilation” of these parcels with informal social and economic contingencies, or the recognition of nonconforming densities. The effort to redraw the urban/suburban landscape creates a new map of nonconformity. Making visible the invisible is the only point of departure for identifying new sites of opportunity for intervention and constructing new categories of zoning, inclusive of transitional and temporal uses as well as the bottom-up informal dynamics that actually give shape to many of these neighborhoods.
The three map/video narratives of Mapping Nonconformity tell the stories of three conditions of territorial/spatial encroachment that enabled the retrofitting of existing environments across the transborder metropolitan area between San Diego and Tijuana.
Cone Room, 2005–2008
Construction cones, wood, and netting
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz, SFAI’s Design and Technology department, inSite_05, and PG&E
Originally conceived for inSite_05 (for which it was named Infohouse: Migrant House), Cone Room has been rebuilt for this exhibition on the upper terrace of the 800 Chestnut Street quad by students in SFAI’s Design and Technology department, in conjunction with Estudio Teddy Cruz. Cone Room acts as both a gaming and a research center for power strategies that circulate around issues of design and warconflict resolution.
A work of ephemeral architecture, Cone Room operates within existing strategies of crossborder recycling—strategies that emanate from the new migrant communities that have influenced architecture along the San Diego–Tijuana border. The temporary structure combines salvaged materials with elements related to recycling processes. The design components not only characterize the “spaces of fl ow” in the border region, but also cite materials utilized in the construction of emergency habitats. Through the transformation of use—the way in which a packing material can become a building material—Cruz posits a sustainable architectural practice. Acting as an informational space for this exhibition, Cone Room also again manifests Estudio Teddy Cruz’s utilization of the recycling tactics it has explored and learned from at the San Diego–Tijuana border.
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional support and assistance for Teddy Cruz and Pedro Reyes: Conflict Resolution have been provided by the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco, the Bureau of Urban Forestry in San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Protocol, and AIA San Francisco.
|
|
