Storming the Gates of Paradise (15 page)

After the Southwest was seized from Mexico, when the gringos from the East began settling the American West, they came to terms with deserts—or didn’t, for a fair number of them died in the terrible crossings of the salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake, the great Nevada sinks into which the rivers vanish, and, most famously, Death Valley. What does it mean that once again the deserts are for dying in, under similar circumstances, despite the existence of railroads and highways and refrigeration and air conditioning and airplanes and interstate waterworks? What do these twenty-first-century reenactments say about the first time these gringos waded, these wanderers died?

In August of 2004, a life-size statue of Jesus Christ was found in the Rio Grande, near Eagle Pass, Texas. Border Patrol agents spotted it from the air and thought it was a body, Jesus as an unsuccessful border crosser, a dead alien. They launched a rescue attempt and retrieved the statue, which no one subsequently claimed as lost property. It was regarded by Catholics in the area as a message from God. On the south side of the border, in Piedras Negro, the statue was regarded as the Christ for the undocumented. “He’s telling us he’s alive and he is here with us,” Veronica de la Pena told a newspaper. “He’s trying to tell us that there is hope.”

Thirty-nine steps across the border; where do we go from here?

Somewhere, somehow, decisions were made for us in the United States about how we would live, work, travel, and socialize, the decisions institutionalized as the very architecture and geography of our everyday lives. What were they thinking, those mid-century designers who divided up the world on so many scales as if fearful of mingling, whether it’s the mingling of public and private, work and home, rich and poor, or old and young? Who insisted we should keep building houses for a middle-class nuclear family that is less and less common, rather than flexible spaces to accommodate solo dwellers, single parents, extended families, and communities whose ties soften the bounds between public and private? Who privileged the car so much that the parking lot, driveway, and garage have almost replaced human-scale architectural façades; who let cars eat up public space and public life? Who forgot to build anything for the service sector, even though those workers more than anyone keep a city running?

In recent years, radical architects have begun to question and jettison those decisions. This route hasn’t always resulted in high-profile projects, but it has opened up broad possibilities, a more significant if less visible achievement. At its most provocative, this opening up is a series of challenges to borders and categories, and its most inspired practitioner might be architect Teddy Cruz. That he is based in San Diego is no coincidence, for that city’s southern edge is divided from Tijuana, Mexico, only by the most trafficked border crossing in the world, an ever more militarized line between the first world and the third, between chaotic exuberance and beige reticence; and for him Latin America
supplies a lexicon of alternative practices from which the United States could learn.

He says of his fellow architects, “We are just working to insert our refined high aesthetic into an invisible city that has been shaped by developers, economists, and politicians. This invisible city is made of height limitations, setbacks [the rules about how far back from the property line you can build], zoning regulation that is very discriminatory. So what came to be my interest is what I call urbanism beyond the property line.” Cruz would like to knit back together the fragmented places that result from a lack of collaboration between urban planners and architects and to spur a level of social engagement that he thinks is absent in most American cities. To do this, architects have to cross the property line and venture into public space, and then cross still another divide. This latter divide he calls the “the gap between social responsibility and artistic experimentation.”

One cloudy Sunday, he drives me in a friend’s scruffy Miata, the one whose trunkful of blueprints looks like contraband, to his newest work in San Diego. We wind through the city’s central green space, Balboa Park, to the museum complex at its heart. A supreme expression of the enthusiastic mix of Mission Revival and Alhambra fantasia that characterized much prewar California architecture, its buildings form a hollow square with, of course, parking at its center. But much of the parking lot is now occupied by Cruz’s pavilion for InSite, the transborder biennale also taking place in Tijuana. The work of installing two tractor-trailer beds and building a tented structure and AstroTurf lounge area was relatively easy; getting permission to do so was not. But breaking rules and opening borders are what Cruz’s work is about. “We closed a parking lot—one of the most sacred parking lots in the city,” he says with satisfaction and amusement. “That was the achievement.”

Cruz is no fan of the way parking lots dominate the American built environment. The reconquest of space for unfettered human interaction might be what he’s after. Or the reinvention of the whole urban fabric. He’s modest but hardly unambitious. A professor at Woodbury College in downtown San Diego, he was recently hired away by the University of California, San Diego. His longtime collaborators in his architecture firm, estudio Teddy Cruz, moved on to other opportunities
at the same time, so his own life is a project under construction these days. At forty-three, Cruz is dapper, sturdily built but somehow slight, perhaps from nervous energy, elliptical in his rapid speech, passionate in his enthusiasms, and usually running late. Somehow, as we traverse both sides of the border this Sunday, I begin to feel like Alice being rushed along by the White Rabbit, though the rabbit in this case is not so white. Born and raised in Guatemala City and brought to San Diego at age twenty by his stepfather, Cruz has been here contending ever since with suburbia, sprawl, real estate booms, the border, and other contingencies of contemporary California.

The crowded, chaotic richness and poverty of Guatemala City instilled in him a permanent enthusiasm for density of both buildings and activities. The fatherless son of the proprietor of a fashionable nightclub, he grew up middle-class in the bustle of a third world city, graduated from high school, and planned to become a doctor until a fellow student took him to see a corpse dissected. Squeamish, he backed off from the plan. An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative. But what decided the matter for him was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. “I don’t know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.”

As he was studying architecture, his mother, already opposed to the government’s growing brutality, got caught storing weapons for rebels in her basement, went to jail, and then emigrated to the United States, where she married a Yankee and brought her offspring over. Cruz moved as soon as he got his BA in architecture, leaving the overstimulation of Guatemala City for the anomie of the brand-new San Diego suburb of Mira Mesa. At first he loved it, and for a year he stayed there, studying English. “I was moving from downtown Guatemala, a place full of smog, an overpopulated old neighborhood, into this incredibly pristine, clean, homogenous kind of place. I saw that it was incredibly ordered; I thought that it was very nice.” The new uncle he was staying with warned him not to go downtown where danger lay, but boredom set in, and he began to explore. “I think it was incremental, this dissatisfaction with suburbia, with lack of social complexity.
In retrospect, every time I wanted go out, I couldn’t move, and the distances were huge to get to places. It can get to you, that relentless kind of sameness.”

He began working in architecture in San Diego in 1984, won his first award in 1986, went back and got a couple more degrees in architecture, spent a year in Florence. After taking another degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he was awarded the Rome Prize and spent another year in Italy (another place that has provided him with alternative models of public space and life). Somewhere in there, he got married and had a daughter, now eighteen; eventually got divorced; started his own practice; and began to teach. He also got married again, to the landscape architect Kate Roe, and had two more daughters, now nine and four. He founded estudio Teddy Cruz in 1993, and in 1994 began the LA/LA (Latin America/Los Angeles) Studio for students from all over Latin America at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute for Architecture. It was in those years that he began to find his focus—and his dissent.

It came in part from his conflicted experience of Latin America. “I wonder,” he muses, “if having grown up in Guatemala makes you like a socialist or a kind of Marxist by default because you are surrounded by so much stuff—by an intense sort of realism.” His mother’s opinion was even more dour: she “wanted us out of there in such disgust with the institutions, and she used to talk about how she hated seeing the archbishop parading in a Mercedes-Benz in the middle of the favelas [impoverished neighborhoods].” As a student in Guatemala City, he recalls, “I was put off by the fact that this school of architecture saw social responsibility as the boxing of people in these awful buildings, very sterile.” Years later, when he went back, “somebody in the audience got up and said, ‘Oh, it’s easy for you to show these artsy images, when in reality the problem here is poverty.’ ” If the Guatemalan architects fell into a utilitarian gloom, the Yankees suffered from an aesthetic drive so pure that it didn’t serve people at all. In the end, he had to start from scratch, looking not just at what could be built but at how to reinvent the conditions in which architects work.

The conventional media for architects are buildings and building materials, but Cruz’s are ideas, images, and conversations with students, developers, colleagues, and citizens—so his greatest influence may be impossible to trace. Though he can
take credit for a few dozen innovative structures in Southern California, he can take far more for tearing down old conventions and charting new ways of thinking. His PowerPoint presentations are things of beauty, zooming from maps of the world to details of children at play, combining computer-generated images, architectural models, his lush collages, photographs of buildings, streets, and aerial views. They leave crowds exhilarated and ready to change the world. It’s not a misnomer to call Cruz an architect—after all, there are enough buildings out there that he has authored. But his most important function may be as a visionary, an exhortatory voice.

Another of his innovations is to focus on traditionally overlooked people and spaces. When he delivered the prestigious James Stirling Memorial Lecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 2004, he declared,

At the time when these mega projects of redevelopment are becoming the basis for the skyrocketing of the real estate market in many city centers across the United States, creating a formidable economic bubble of land speculation, practically no one is asking where the cook, janitor, service maid, bus-boy, nanny, gardener and many of the thousands of immigrants crossing the border(s) to fulfill the demand for such jobs will live, and what kinds of rents and housing markets will be available to them. Well, they live in the inner city. It is not a coincidence, then, that the territory that continues to be ignored is the inner city.

He has designed for these sectors repeatedly and is currently in discussion about a project to create a day-laborer center in San Francisco (“day labor” being the current term for the mostly undocumented painters, builders, landscapers, and other mostly Latino workers who line up each morning at informally designated sites in cities across the country, waiting for employers to pick them).

He is also interested in working with the in-between spaces and no-man’slands that cities generate, the empty space that surrounds each design for a site, and the niches too minor for architectural glory. “Nonconforming uses” is the planning-codespeak for projects that violate the zoning code, and it’s a phrase Cruz is so fond of that, he tells me, he “was proposing to change the Coalition of
New Urbanists” to the “Coalition of Nonconforming Urbanists.” The New Urbanists are a bugbear of his, because what began as a radical project to bring public and pedestrian space, mixed uses, and classes back to cities and towns has too often settled into a dressing-up of middle-class housing with more density and some commerce, but no room—again—for the poor and no real transformations in social life. Cruz cherishes human interactions, and none of his designs or critiques overlooks how people actually inhabit buildings and spaces.

At his parking-lot transgression for InSite in Balboa Park, Cruz is delighted that some teenagers broke in after hours to hang out in the pavilion, without damaging anything; their desire to use the space was a real measure of success to him. He proposes that rather than measure density by the number of dwellings or residents per square block, we measure it by the number of interactions—the more the better. With goals like this, the solutions stop looking like ordinary architecture. From the pavilion, we head to San Diego’s Gaslight District, which is supposed to be the center of a great downtown revival—meaning, mostly, that its grid has filled up with chain stores, restaurants, and high-rise condos. Cruz complains that such projects “are ironically importing into city centers the very suburban project of privatization, homogenization, and ‘theming’ accompanied by ‘loftlike’ high-end housing, stadiums, and the official corporate franchises.” He thinks it’s great that the middle class is coming back to cities, but terrible that in doing so they make these centers less citylike.

We drive around and around looking for parking, closer to publicly financed, corporately named Qualcomm Stadium than to the Gaslight District. Strangely, there is no parking nor any people—the area by the stadium feels deserted. Or almost no people. We pass a woman wearing headphones and waving a giant sign advertising condos—a common sight in this real estate boomtown. Back and forth she swings this placard, selling a downtown that isn’t a downtown in crucial ways, bored and alone on her corner near the stadium, her sign promising dream homes, her face reporting alienation. The green space in front of the stadium that was supposed to be a public park has been surrounded by fencing and annexed by the sports corporations, Cruz points out, another wall he is indignant about. Near it, we find a place to dump the Miata.