Interview: Teddy Cruz

My colleague Fonna Forman from UCSD forwarded this link to an interview with Teddy Cruz, a remarkable artist who works on all sorts of projects having to do with the border Tijuana-San Diego border and the ways people cross and use it. I've posted on Cruz's work here a couple of times before.

Re-designing Medellín

"Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be."

I lifted the comment above from this article in The New York Times which recounts the renaissance of Medellín, Colombia. I just tonight came across the link courtesy of Fonna Forman. There is an interesting entanglement of architectural focus on public space, cultural activism, and democratic participation at work here. No panacea promised, just a hopeful example.

Ai Weiwei on Democracy and Development

Ai Weiwei ~ White House (1999)

"You cannot simply give up fundamental beliefs in human rights for a short-term gain.

This kind of thinking will cause tragedy in the future. It is going to be a strong challenge for the nations of the world to survive economically and at the same time protect civilized values, which come from the long struggle of science and humanitarianism.

We see the tendency in the world to criticize democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people's rights. This is not something the west should be happy about. In a town like Guangzhou there are thousands of workers who suffer injuries such as losing fingers in work accidents. They are on low salaries. They have no future.

Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see – and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words "human rights" in public. You see it in France, with Hu Jintao's visit last week. How can people be so short-sighted? How can they betray those basic values?" ~ Ai Weiwei (7 Nov 2010)

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been in the news both in Britain [1] [2] [3] [4] and back home [1] [2] [3] over the past several weeks. He has taken it upon himself to not only challenge his own government, but to characterize in a straightforward way the craven behavior of Western politicians - "pitiful." His outspokenness has gotten him warnings from the Chinese authorities. Just as an aside, Ai seems to be yet another of the architects who, in one or another way, weave art and politics together as they encounter the world.

What is it about Architects?

Krzysztof Wodiczko ~ Photograph © Ewa Harabasz

Maya Lin~ Photograph © Enrico Ferorelli

Arundhati Roy ~ Photograph © Shanker Chakravarty.

Alfedo Jaar ~ Photograph: Production Still © Art 21.

That is my question. None of these people works as an architect in the standard sense of someone who designs buildings. They've turned their talents and energies elsewhere. But Jaar, Roy, and Lin all trained as architects. Wodiczko, I believe, did not, but draws a pay check from the M.I.T. School of Architecture. I suppose all of these folks - whose work I greatly admire - have this in common: they are all concerned with shaping public space as a way of working out common knowledge and collective memory.

Recycling Suburbia

"The leftover parts of San Diego's older subdivisions--standard framing, joists, connectors, plywood, aluminum windows, garage doors--are being disassembled and recombined just across the border. A few miles south, in Tijuana, new informal suburbs--some call them slums--spring up from one day to another. This river of urban waste flows across the Tijuana-San Diego to make something dramatically new.

On the edges of Tijuana, rife with poverty, social upheaval and a severe housing shortage, the detritus of San Diego's suburbs is reassembled into a fresh milieu, a city made of waste. But not only small, scattered debris is imported and recycled into makeshift housing in Tijuana. Entire pieces of one city travel southward as residential ready-made houses are directly plugged in to the other city's fabric. This process begins when a Tijuana speculator travels to San Diego to buy up the little post-World War II bungalows that have been slated for demolition. The little houses are loaded onto trailers to travel to Tijuana, where they clear customs before making their journey south. On some days here, one can see houses, just like cars and pedestrians, waiting in line to cross the border." ~ Teddy Cruz

~~~~~~~~~~

About 18 months ago I posted on Teddy Cruz, an architect who works at the border of Tijuana and San Diego. This evening I came across a short essay of his - "A City Made of Waste" - in The Nation. It is accompanied by a film (lifted here) of the same name made by Laura Hanna. Ironically enough, I wrote a post yesterday and called it Recycling the Suburbs? where I complained that "design ideas tend to be class-blind." Well, Cruz comments on the underlying class and ethnic basis of the processes by which suburban San Diego literally is being disassembled and recycled in Tijuana.

Teddy Cruz

One of the chapters in Rebecca Solnit's new book is an essay she wrote under the auspices of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, Chicago. The Center has commissioned a set of profiles entitled Democratic Vistas. As part of that series Solnit has written an essay entitled "Non-Conforming Uses: Architect Teddy Cruz at the Borders of Tomorrow" on ex-patriot Guatemalan architect Teddy Cruz. You can find a pdf version of her essay here. And you can find a recent story on Cruz from The New York Times here. Basically, Cruz works on the border of San Diego & Tijuana looking at the insights that flow in both directions as practices and living patterns on each side cross back and forth at the border. In April 2005 Cruz delivered the James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City under the title "Border Postcards: Chronicles from the Edge." Solnit reproduces the image at right - Border Wall Sequence, 2004 © estudio Teddy Cruz - as part of her discussion.