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The World Design Organization (WDO) has announced a cross-border combination of San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico as the official World Design Capital for 2024. The designation was bestowed “as a result of their commitment to human-centered design and legacy of cross-border collaboration... View full entry
This week René Peralta and Orhan Ayyüce joins us to discuss Tijuana and the unique border condition the Mexican city shares with San Diego. Listen to "Trans-Border Patrolling ": iTunes: Click here to listen, and click the "Subscribe" button below the logo to automatically download new... View full entry
The architect Eugenio Velazquez has had a tough couple years. Back in 2012, he was jailed for smuggling cocaine from Mexico into the United States. Now, his design for a new cathedral in Tijuana has been shut down—11 years after work first started.The Archbishop of Tijuana, Francisco Moreno... View full entry
In Tijuana, another architect is devising a plan to turn the Tijuana River channel into a solar farm that could provide power to as many as 30,000 homes.
Rene Peralta, co-founder of the Tijuana firm Generica and director of an architecture master's program at San Diego's Woodbury University, thinks that his city can transform this unwieldy piece of infrastructure into a renewable energy plant and water-cleaning station.
— The Los Angeles Times
February 2016 was the hottest month in several thousand years, so it seems like a good idea to start transforming erstwhile urban heat islands into power-generating rivers. Below, Generica's rendering of the proposed redesigned Tijuana river channel:For more on projects that turn seemingly... View full entry
A purple pedestrian bridge between two terminals that link Tijuana International Airport and San Diego over the U.S.-Mexico border opened to passengers Wednesday morning.
The Cross Border Xpress is the first project to join a site in the U.S. with a foreign airport terminal. [...]
The $120-million private venture aims to serve about 2.4 million fliers each year who usually would have to queue up in busy border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa on the California side.
— latimes.com
"We want students to be able to build — to go to a building or a plaza and be able to analyze what works and what doesn't. And we want them to work within the social context, in this case, of Tijuana."
"Tijuana is our laboratory," says Enrique González Silva, the school's founding academic director. "The idea of the program is that the students understand the reality of being an architect here." [...]
"The theory is very important. But we want students to be able to design and build."
— latimes.com
More on Tijuana's developing architectures:Minimalist Homes Rise in Tijuana as Violence SubsidesEl futuro necesita imaginarse; Tijuana, Edgelands and Network cultureRethinking the U.S./Mexico Border Fence View full entry
Ask almost any of the local architects in this Mexican border town and they will tell you Tijuana has become a hotbed of building activity.
The growing demand for designer homes, they say, is being driven primarily by Tijuana natives returning to the city...
Most of the developments in Tijuana are for upper-middle-class families ... but the spare designs and basic building materials, especially concrete, used by Mr. Medina and others make it possible for more residents to have designed homes.
— nytimes.com
Drop by Hollywood’s finest art and architecture bookstore, Hennessey + Ingalls, tonight for a special event launching Shaping the City, a newly revised edition of contemporary urbanism case studies. The event will also feature a conversation with University of Toronto’s Director of... View full entry
As we look at the border in an age of network culture ascendant, we need to do so with the special goggles of a Deleuzian Israeli commando, and see the presence of the networks that are the real nervous system of the cities on both sides, networks that pay little attention to the border...As we look at the robot eyes of the surveillance cameras, we need to pay more attention to how networks let the people conduct surveillance on power. — The New York Review of Science Fiction
Chris N Brown analyzes the threads between; a) a series of recent projects by Pepe Rojo, (of the media studies faculty of the Autonomous University of Baja California) and 150 of his students in creating the imaginary Tijuana Liberation Front (FLT), dedicated to articulating-hacking the... View full entry
It would be easy for me to raise a picket sign and as an architect say, ‘Down with this wall!’ — Fast Company
"Border Wall as Infrastructure" a proposal by Ron Rael and a partner, Virginia San Fratello, was a finalist in the 2010 Working Public Architecture 2.0 Competition organized by UCLA's cityLAB. Mr. Rael is first to admit that his plan isn't likely to be implemented anytime soon. Until then... View full entry
