The crowded, chaotic richness and poverty of Guatemala City instilled in him a permanent enthusiasm for density of both buildings and activities. The fatherless son of the proprietor of a fashionable nightclub, he grew up middle-class in the bustle of a third world city, graduated from high school, and planned to become a doctor until a fellow student took him to see a corpse dissected. Squeamish, he backed off from the plan. An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative. But what decided the matter for him was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. “I don’t know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.”
As he was studying architecture, his mother, already opposed to the government’s growing brutality, got caught storing weapons for rebels in her basement, went to jail, and then emigrated to the United States, where she married a Yankee and brought her offspring over. Cruz moved as soon as he got his BA in architecture, leaving the overstimulation of Guatemala City for the anomie of the brand-new San Diego suburb of Mira Mesa. At first he loved it, and for a year he stayed there, studying English. “I was moving from downtown Guatemala, a place full of smog, an overpopulated old neighborhood, into this incredibly pristine, clean, homogenous kind of place. I saw that it was incredibly ordered; I thought that it was very nice.” The new uncle he was staying with warned him not to go downtown where danger lay, but boredom set in, and he began to explore. “I think it was incremental, this dissatisfaction with suburbia, with lack of social complexity. In retrospect, every time I wanted go out, I couldn’t move, and the distances were huge to get to places. It can get to you, that relentless kind of sameness.”
He began working in architecture in San Diego in 1984, won his first award in 1986, went back and got a couple more degrees in architecture, spent a year in Florence. After taking another degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he was awarded the Rome Prize and spent another year in Italy (another place that has provided him with alternative models of public space and life). Somewhere in there, he got married and had a daughter, now eighteen; eventually got divorced; started his own practice; and began to teach. He also got married again, to the landscape architect Kate Roe, and had two more daughters, now nine and four. He founded estudio Teddy Cruz in 1993, and in 1994 began the LA/LA (Latin America/Los Angeles) Studio for students from all over Latin America at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute for Architecture. It was in those years that he began to find his focus—and his dissent.
It came in part from his conflicted experience of Latin America. “I wonder,” he muses, “if having grown up in Guatemala makes you like a socialist or a kind of Marxist by default because you are surrounded by so much stuff—by an intense sort of realism.” His mother’s opinion was even more dour: she “wanted us out of there in such disgust with the institutions, and she used to talk about how she hated seeing the archbishop parading in a Mercedes-Benz in the middle of the favelas [impoverished neighborhoods].” As a student in Guatemala City, he recalls, “I was put off by the fact that this school of architecture saw social responsibility as the boxing of people in these awful buildings, very sterile.” Years later, when he went back, “somebody in the audience got up and said, ‘Oh, it’s easy for you to show these artsy images, when in reality the problem here is poverty.’ ” If the Guatemalan architects fell into a utilitarian gloom, the Yankees suffered from an aesthetic drive so pure that it didn’t serve people at all. In the end, he had to start from scratch, looking not just at what could be built but at how to reinvent the conditions in which architects work.
The conventional media for architects are buildings and building materials, but Cruz’s are ideas, images, and conversations with students, developers, colleagues, and citizens—so his greatest influence may be impossible to trace. Though he can take credit for a few dozen innovative structures in Southern California, he can take far more for tearing down old conventions and charting new ways of thinking. His PowerPoint presentations are things of beauty, zooming from maps of the world to details of children at play, combining computer-generated images, architectural models, his lush collages, photographs of buildings, streets, and aerial views. They leave crowds exhilarated and ready to change the world. It’s not a misnomer to call Cruz an architect—after all, there are enough buildings out there that he has authored. But his most important function may be as a visionary, an exhortatory voice.
Another of his innovations is to focus on traditionally overlooked people and spaces. When he delivered the prestigious James Stirling Memorial Lecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 2004, he declared,
At the time when these mega projects of redevelopment are becoming the basis for the skyrocketing of the real estate market in many city centers across the United States, creating a formidable economic bubble of land speculation, practically no one is asking where the cook, janitor, service maid, bus-boy, nanny, gardener and many of the thousands of immigrants crossing the border(s) to fulfill the demand for such jobs will live, and what kinds of rents and housing markets will be available to them. Well, they live in the inner city. It is not a coincidence, then, that the territory that continues to be ignored is the inner city.
He has designed for these sectors repeatedly and is currently in discussion about a project to create a day-laborer center in San Francisco (“day labor” being the current term for the mostly undocumented painters, builders, landscapers, and other mostly Latino workers who line up each morning at informally designated sites in cities across the country, waiting for employers to pick them).
He is also interested in working with the in-between spaces and no-man’slands that cities generate, the empty space that surrounds each design for a site, and the niches too minor for architectural glory. “Nonconforming uses” is the planning-codespeak for projects that violate the zoning code, and it’s a phrase Cruz is so fond of that, he tells me, he “was proposing to change the Coalition of New Urbanists” to the “Coalition of Nonconforming Urbanists.” The New Urbanists are a bugbear of his, because what began as a radical project to bring public and pedestrian space, mixed uses, and classes back to cities and towns has too often settled into a dressing-up of middle-class housing with more density and some commerce, but no room—again—for the poor and no real transformations in social life. Cruz cherishes human interactions, and none of his designs or critiques overlooks how people actually inhabit buildings and spaces.
At his parking-lot transgression for InSite in Balboa Park, Cruz is delighted that some teenagers broke in after hours to hang out in the pavilion, without damaging anything; their desire to use the space was a real measure of success to him. He proposes that rather than measure density by the number of dwellings or residents per square block, we measure it by the number of interactions—the more the better. With goals like this, the solutions stop looking like ordinary architecture. From the pavilion, we head to San Diego’s Gaslight District, which is supposed to be the center of a great downtown revival—meaning, mostly, that its grid has filled up with chain stores, restaurants, and high-rise condos. Cruz complains that such projects “are ironically importing into city centers the very suburban project of privatization, homogenization, and ‘theming’ accompanied by ‘loftlike’ high-end housing, stadiums, and the official corporate franchises.” He thinks it’s great that the middle class is coming back to cities, but terrible that in doing so they make these centers less citylike.
We drive around and around looking for parking, closer to publicly financed, corporately named Qualcomm Stadium than to the Gaslight District. Strangely, there is no parking nor any people—the area by the stadium feels deserted. Or almost no people. We pass a woman wearing headphones and waving a giant sign advertising condos—a common sight in this real estate boomtown. Back and forth she swings this placard, selling a downtown that isn�
�t a downtown in crucial ways, bored and alone on her corner near the stadium, her sign promising dream homes, her face reporting alienation. The green space in front of the stadium that was supposed to be a public park has been surrounded by fencing and annexed by the sports corporations, Cruz points out, another wall he is indignant about. Near it, we find a place to dump the Miata.
Many of the downtown condos, he tells me, are second homes, meaning that they are often empty. The emptiness of affluence annoys him, and one of his plans is a series of drawings showing how “a McMansion can be turned into three houses”—that is, how ostentatious waste and selfishness could be retrofitted for ordinary people and more environmentally reasonable living. “Well,” he says, “if we were really to look at the factors, the conditions that have transformed the last forty years, could we anticipate that in the next forty years the third and fourth forces, immigrations, will be equally transformative?” Clearly, he hopes so.
He said on local television not long ago, “I could be in the center right now of one of those new communities in Del Mar and, just viscerally, when I’m in the middle of that place, I just . . . feel completely sad. Twenty minutes later, I’m in the middle of Tijuana. I feel a lot more charged. . . . I cannot help but want to escape that kind of sterility in San Diego and then embrace this, what you might call chaos.” Chaos, as in a lot going on and a lot of kinds of people present—as in social density.
We leave the car to walk into a parking structure where the work of another InSite artist, Aernout Mik, is installed, a huge screen in the sepulchral gloom of the garage showing a video that mixes footage of subdivisions seen from above—San Diego—with images of a fictionalized version of Tijuana’s pharmacies. Cruz finds it amusing that the place that was once a magnet for the illicit is now a mecca for people looking for cheap but legal drugs; the pharmacies that line Avenida de la Revolución are temples—mirrors multiply the carefully arranged piles of toothpaste, drugs, and toiletries into a confusion of abundance, and employees in white doctors’ jackets solicit customers at the open front.
The sight of the pharmacies whets our appetite for something livelier than this abandoned zone, and so we drive south on I-5 to another parking lot—this one a short walk from the militarized carnival zone that is the border. And with that, all the rules are about to change, which is part of why Cruz brings people across so often. There you can see difference, see the innovativeness born out of poverty and its sometimes exuberant results.
To enter Mexico is easy; there are no delays, no checks, no armed officials sorting out who may enter or who may not. You walk up a long ramp lined with vendors and keep going, until the down ramp spits you out into a pedestrian plaza circled by makeshift buildings. Women and children approach, selling crafts—my pale presence is a magnet for them, Teddy ruefully notes—but we walk on to the city center, down streets as gleaming and theatrical as in Dutch artist Mik’s parking-garage video. Somehow the very texture changes when you leave San Diego for Tijuana. There’s more color and more people, even the texture of sidewalks and streets is different—more potholes and irregularities, a veneer of dust and grime that tints the energy and the vividness of this other world.
Cruz decides on a detour, and suddenly we leave behind the gringo-commodities zone to join a mostly Mexican crowd. Men and women, walking in a large group, are chanting angrily and carrying placards we cannot read from behind. They march down the middle of the street, and cars and trucks in the one remaining lane honk in solidarity. Street and sidewalk are crowded and bustling. We follow the protestors for blocks, and at an intersection lined with onlookers and vendors of cut fruit, Teddy asks one of the participants what’s going on. It’s a demonstration against the Tijuana mayor’s decision to eliminate the unofficial transit network, the Blanco y Azul buses that transport workers around the city and its sprawling periphery of slums and sweatshops. For Cruz, this is a sign of the Americanization of the place, the insistence on official monopolies and the banning of the unofficial options, whether they work or not.
It’s the improvised solutions to poverty that he seeks out among the slums and favelas of Latin America, starting with Tijuana, and he admits that it’s easy to romanticize poverty rather than admire the poor, whose solutions are often creative, subversive, and environmentally sound—Tijuana does much to recycle the discarded materials of San Diego. On an earlier tour, he took me to see the small houses salvaged from San Diego as an alternative to demolition, homes that had themselves emigrated across the border. Whole structures have been imported to Mexico and resituated, often on raised metal scaffolds so that the first story becomes the second. The improvised architecture of Tijuana delights him, the homes built piecemeal and the retaining walls made out of tires, the squats and guerrilla housing that Mexico, with a very different attitude toward real estate rights, often allows to become neighborhoods of legitimate homeowners.
We saw La Mona, the five-story statue that dominates one poor barrio—a voluptuous, naked, plaster-white woman that is not a public monument like the more prim Statue of Liberty but a private home, built by Armando Muñoz in this zone of no zoning codes. Kids running in the dust of the unpaved roads, power lines with dozens of lines spliced into them, houses in vivid lavenders and oranges and lime greens, laundry on the line, and stray dogs are fixtures in this barrio. Just past it is the international border, the new fence being put in, a row of deceptively open-looking, off-white vertical strips that look less brutal but are also more forbidding than the corrugated metal landing pads from the Gulf War that were erected in the early 1990s (a recycling suggesting that this too is a war zone). In his presentations, Cruz often shows a picture of Colonia Libertad, this border neighborhood, in the early 1970s, fenceless, with a little boy flying a kite on the undeveloped U.S. side of the line. The border has grown steadily more massive and more militarized over the past two decades. It didn’t used to be such a big deal.
On the Mexican side, homes push all the way up to the fence—“zero setback,” Teddy likes to say, adapting zoning language to the layout of international relations. Such shifts in scale are a big part of his language and worldview; he is as interested in the borders that govern the single-family home as those that divide two nations on one continent. Tijuana “crashes against this wall. It’s almost like the wall becomes a dam that keeps the intensity of this chaos from contaminating the picturesque order of San Diego. . . . It’s a whole country leaning against the other.” But he goes on to explain that there’s more than physical distance at stake: “I’m talking about an attitude toward the everyday, toward the space, toward the way that we use the space, toward ritual, toward the relationship to the other.” Not the utilitarian architecture he encountered in school in Guatemala City, but the vernacular, improvisational responses and networks that could do much for more affluent realms.
The ever more militarized border makes San Diego in his terms, “the world’s largest gated community.” Though the United States likes to consider Mexico a corrupting influence, it’s the Mexican city serving the United States that is regarded as shameful, weird, and not quite part of its own country, while the booming U.S. city abutted up against it calls itself “America’s Finest City.” That’s part of the great paradox of the border. Another is the abrupt line where two worlds meet—or rather where one world presses forward and the other shrinks back. Even the ecology has become different on each side. And yet there are countless ways it doesn’t divide anything. Mexicans emigrate north with or without papers; Americans who work in San Diego have moved south to buy affordable waterfront homes on the other side, an American dream no longer in America; California as a whole becomes more and more Latino, with Latinos due to become the majority population in the next decade; and by some accounts 40 percent of the San Diego workforce lives south of the border. Tiendas selling Mexican washtubs and other goods show up in San Diego, while U.S. chain restaurants spread in Tijuana. It’s a dam that builds up pressure without truly stopping the fl
ow, a line that does and doesn’t divide.
This reading of the border lets Cruz think about the two great forces of globalization and privatization in relation to everyday life. Globalization as the influx of human beings from other cultures to the United States and as the export of dubious U.S. models of architecture, urban (and suburban) design, and consumption; the spread of chains; and the concomitant erosion of local culture. Privatization as the spatial and psychological withdrawal from the public sphere and the collective good that accompanies an ideology of individualism and free enterprise. And perhaps a counter to privatization in the reinvigorated sense of public life and public space that sometimes comes with Latino immigrants.
And though Cruz is interested in what the United States could learn from Latin America, it’s clear that Latin America and much of the rest of the world are learning from the United States—there’s an elite development in China that he points to in dismay, an exact replica of an Orange County suburban tract, with lawns, boxy stucco houses fronted by garages and driveways, and curvy streets. And then there is the subdivision in Tijuana we went to look at one day, a strange grid of miniaturized single-family homes plopped like a carpet on a rolling landscape. Each home had a driveway out front, but there was not enough room for them to be freestanding; instead they pressed against each other in long rows. “The first image is that of a cemetery, these small mausoleums,” he remarks. “This is not that different from San Diego, in that sense.”
For him, the Tijuana subdivision redeemed itself through the quick customization of each home, painted different colors, with wrought iron safety gates or ornaments added, with small businesses and built additions, so that they began to diverge into something more varied and more expressive—in other words, the dwellers became informal collaborators with the architects, a step he welcomes. Such customization also happens in non-Latino American neighborhoods, he agrees; it is more because this is where his roots are that he comes back again and again to the world south of the border—that and the fact that what the United States is getting from Mexico and from Latinos is highly politicized now.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 12
