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Teddy Cruz: A Tale of Two Cities

2018-03-12T09:00:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by the Vilcek Foundation

When Vilcek Prizewinner Teddy Cruz first emigrated from Guatemala, he had no idea that San Diego was a border town. He did not speak English, and his relatives had warned him that going downtown would be risky and dangerous.

"It took me almost a year to exit this Truman Show," he says. He was surprised to realize that not twenty minutes away from his new home were vibrant immigrant neighborhoods along the U.S.-Mexico border, and, just on the other side of the wall, the city of Tijuana.

It was a sharp contrast to the staid, homogenous suburbs he was living in, and Teddy began to cross the border often to spend time in Tijuana. "The texture, the ruggedness, of a place like Tijuana reminded me of my own country," he says. "I think that oscillation back and forth between these very different ways of constructing cities [is] where my sensibilities began...as an architect."

That realization, however, would come years later. Teddy had im...

Immigrant Architects Honored with 2018 Vilcek Prizes

2018-02-12T09:00:00-05:00

This post is brought to you by the Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Vilcek Prizes in the Arts and Humanities, this year recognizing the field of architecture. Awarded annually, the prizes call attention to the breadth of immigrant contributions to the American arts and sciences.

“The social, political, and cultural landscape of America has been shaped by generations of immigrant contributions,” says Marica Vilcek, co-founder and vice chairman of the Vilcek Foundation. “With the Vilcek Prizes in Architecture, we are pleased to recognize the many ways in which they have shaped its physical landscape as well—through bold, original designs, and through research that challenges the status quo, both in the building arts and in society.”

The Vilcek Prize in Architecture, which comes with a $100,000 cash prize, is awarded to architect and urban researcher Teddy Cruz, professor at University of California, San Diego, and director of desi...

Architecture and the Wall: Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman on the US-Mexico Border

2016-06-23T12:45:00-04:00

..We must expose rather than mask the institutional mechanisms driving uneven urban development. Such a revelation requires a corresponding expansion of our understanding of the scope of architecture itself—can we design human rights, for example? Can social justice become an architectural protocol? In other words, the most important materials with which architects must learn to work are not steel and concrete but critical knowledge of the underlying conditions that produce today’s urban crises.

The article makes reference to the controversy generated a few months ago over a competition to design Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposed border wall between the US and Mexico. The editors of Bustler, Archinect's sister site, decided not to host the competition due to potential conflicts with our ethical standards, writing, "We are conflicted about the nature of the competition and fear that it promotes xenophobia. The competition goes against the ethical standards we strive to align ourselves with.”

For more on the competition, check out the editorial on Bustler.

The Problem With Designing Trump’s Border Wall

2016-03-29T19:20:00-04:00

An online competition spurred by his proposal has launched a fierce debate among architects and border communities. What do local communities think?

Architect, urbanist, and professor Teddy Cruz, who has been working on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border for 25 years, presented the competition as a moment in which architects cannot remain neutral. Sometimes, he said, architects must decide when not to build, since “the politics of neutrality has rendered architecture a pure decoration of very unjust policies.”

He added, “Instead of building walls that are dividing communities and dividing environments, we should be looking at border regions as laboratories for rethinking citizenship, for rethinking resilience, for producing new strategies of interdependence and cooperation and co-existence.” This framework is central to his own practice, in which he has designed multi-functional housing informed by the creative building strategies, extended family structures, and cultural life of informal settlements in Tijuana and immigrant neighborhoods in San Diego.

Perhaps there is a broader lesson that can be drawn from the controvers...