Estudio Teddy Cruz
Practice of Encroachment: From the global border to the border neighborhood
Thursday, July 10 – October 25, 2008
Opening reception Thursday, July 10, 2008, 6-8 pm
29 Bleecker Street
New York
The PARC Foundation will present the work of Estudio Teddy Cruz at its gallery’s inaugural architectural exhibition, from Thursday, July 10, through Saturday, October 25. 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 Hudson, NY, where “Hudson 2+4″ has been produced in collaboration with the PARC Foundation.
About the PARC Foundation:
PARC Foundation was created to raise public awareness of environmental planning and the importance of architectural design excellence. Since its inception, the Foundation has been originating and operating its own cultural programs, and promoting intersections between art and architecture, including working since 2004 in the City of Hudson, NY to investigate new approaches for community re-development. In 2006, the Foundation began a strategic partnership with designer Teddy Cruz to advance its research and to strengthen the mission of providing public, socio-economic and cultural support systems for communities in need.
Media Contact:
For more information, images, or to arrange for an interview, please contact:
Andy Cushman or Elizabeth Reina
Blue Medium, Inc.
T: (212) 675-1800
Andy@bluemedium.com