NYAB Event - Estudio Teddy Cruz "Practice of Encroachment: From the global border to the border neighborhood"

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At PARC Foundation Gallery
Media: Drawing, Photography, Architecture, Video installation

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The PARC Foundation will present the work of Estudio Teddy Cruz at its gallery's inaugural architectural exhibition. His research-based architectural studio, located at the San Diego-Tijuana border, has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations for using the neighborhood as a site of experimentation in order to research new forms of affordable housing and social density.

According to Cruz, "The need to reveal territorial and institutional conflict as an operational tool to redefine architecture practice is prompting many architects to research the conditions that can promote the intensification of social relations and public culture at the different scales of the territory, the city and the neighborhood."

This exhibition will serve as a public platform to discuss the crisis of affordable housing, and the de-funding of public infrastructure in the contemporary city. It will elaborate on the realization that no advances in socially and environmentally sustainable building design can occur without reorganizing the existing political structures, economic resources, and social capital that can produce alternative systems for habitation.

Organized around a series of conceptual and geographic scales, the exhibition takes the viewer from the concept of an increasing global border (coined by Teddy Cruz as the "political equator") to the micro-scale of the neighborhood on the border of San Diego and Tijuana that has served as a laboratory for Estudio Teddy Cruz in the last few years. The exhibition shows that it is in peripheral areas such as these that conditions of social emergency are transforming our way of thinking about urban matters.

The projects on view include conceptual works, presented through videos, photographs, drawings, models and cartographies, such as "Mapping Non-Conformity," which questions conventions of land use representations and its exclusion of social interactions to measure density, and "McMansion Retrofitted," which proposes to alter an existing 8000 square foot single-family suburban house into a mixed-use multi-family dwelling.

Projects of intervention are also included in the exhibition. Some of these projects are grounded in San Diego/Tijuana urban dynamics. In "Living Rooms at the Border", a project developed in collaboration with Casa Familiar, special zoning accommodations are being negotiated with the city of San Diego to allow a parcel of land that would normally accommodate three single family homes to instead accommodate 12 affordable housing units operating with a shared kitchen, community garden, and a former church transformed into a community center in the border town of San Ysidro. "Manufactured Sites" creates a semi modular frame, produced by a Tijuana maquiladora (manufacturing plant), that serves as a scaffold when combined with salvaged and recycled building parts brought from San Diego to create worker housing. Other projects present how the lessons from Estudio Teddy Cruz's border neighborhood projects have been translated to interventions in different regions, such as Hud son, NY, where "Hudson 2+4" has been produced in collaboration with the PARC Foundation.

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