Teddy Cruz
Principal, Estudio Teddy Cruz | San Diego
Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism, Visual Arts Department | UC San Diego
“Most architects live to build. Teddy Cruz lives to lay the economic, social and political groundwork for buildings — specifically, housing and small-scale commercial centers for minority communities, most of them in the rapidly growing area between San Diego, Calif., and Tijuana, Mexico, where, Cruz said, ‘some of the richest real estate in the world is 20 minutes away from some of the poorest.’
Rather than obsess over the design of a facade or a door handle, Cruz, 47, whose six-person office is in San Diego and who does only nonprofit projects, designs systems. ‘I call myself a facilitator,’ he explained. But these systems are not the grand mega-schemes of contemporary urban planning; Cruz is all about the small-scale. Finding inspiration in border shantytowns, Cruz — who was born in Guatemala and came to this country when he was 20 — argues that their high-density, ad hoc, “bottom-up” brand of development provides a better model of urbanism than that of the low-density, faux-traditional conformity of the typical American suburb. Cruz, who also teaches at the University of California, San Diego, cited as an example the large numbers of tiny California bungalows, which would otherwise have been demolished, that are trucked across the border to Mexico. There, they are often jacked up on steel frames, with a food shop or car-repair service in the space below, or placed astride their neighbors’ frames, creating communities in which residential and commercial zones are basically indistinguishable, and which teem with activity day and night. Places like these are ‘less about physical buildings and more about social flows,’ Cruz noted. ‘Density is not just about units per acre but the number of social and economic exchanges.’” -The Nifty 50 | Teddy Cruz, Architect
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another architect that inspires me. after irma ramirez
