Interview with Teddy Cruz
Just Published in Triple Canopy.
Architect and activist Teddy Cruz has been stationed along the border of the U.S. and Mexico for the past decade, traversing the territory between San Diego and Tijuana, observing the social structures and urban formations of each place. He has developed an architectural practice that is rooted in the realities of informal settlements and immigrant suburbs, and that is equally engaged with the needs—and innovations—of their residents and the exigencies of their local bureaucracies. Cruz spoke with Triple Canopy over the course of the past six months.
Caleb Waldorf: You’ve been doing work on informal architecture and cross-border urbanism for many years. How has your practice shifted—or how has the relevance of your practice shifted—since the economic collapse?
Teddy Cruz: I’ve always operated in the context of crisis. Over the last few decades, the physical manifestations of capital—corporate high-rises and luxury condos—have become the laboratories of the avant-garde in architecture (though calling them “laboratories” grants them too much credibility; better to call them sites of economic power that became playgrounds for architects). This was a sad thing to witness. Many of the manifestos that inspired me when I was in school in the early 80s were truly trivialized in this context. But now architects are shifting focus from those sites of abundance to sites of scarcity.
I’ve been trying to make this case for years: It is, in fact, in the most depressed, disenfranchised and underrepresented neighborhoods that some of the more interesting social and political agendas have begun to emerge—as we’ve been focused on Shanghai and Dubai, harboring an infatuation with those places and their ability to produce and support architects. The most inventive, progressive, experimental projects have not happened in China or the Emirates (where architecture is so often treated as an object or icon), but within the context of infrastructure, in Latin America.
Architects and politicians such as Jaime Lerner in Curitiba, Brazil, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa in Bogotá, and Sergio Fajardo in Medellín, Colombia, are rethinking the meaning of infrastructure on many registers: suggesting how to negotiate a new relationship between top-down and bottom-up dynamics; blending top-down industry and economic power with bottom-up social networks and activism. The idea is that urban pedagogy can generate a new type and scale—and suggest a very different kind of awareness—of infrastructure and transportation.
Estudio Teddy Cruz, Neighborhood Urbanism: The Informal as a Tool to Transform Policy, 2008
