Looking South from Suburbia

The New York Times profiles Teddy Cruz, a Guatemalan-born architect in San Diego who has watched his neighbors in Tijuana, on the Mexican border, adapt American suburbia to local ideas about development. In bustling Tijuana, storefronts and workshops are carved out of homes and front yards and entire houses are piled on top of other buildings to fit businesses below. Cruz sees in Tijuana's reconfigured suburbia a fluid, multilayered antidote to the gated community, which in turn he regards as analogous to our clamped-down border. His own designs include houses pre-stacked above hollow structures for retail space and conjoined, communal housing. His version of border suburbia, says the Times, could be “a humane model for rethinking America's suburbs that could be applied to the new immigrant suburbs of the Midwest or the flood-ruined New Orleans.” With artist Rebecca Solnit, Cruz is also making drawings for converting a 70,000 McMansion in suburban San Francisco into multifamily housing.