Social architecture is shaped by acts of imagination and resistance for a community that is always unfolding. In 1975–76 an experiment in popular housing was developed in northern Mexico, based on the “pattern language”¹ invented by architect Christopher Alexander. The complex of houses, a cluster with vaulted roofs surrounding a central courtyard, was intended to be a small functional community, and an affordable prototype to be replicated in different cities beyond Mexicali, where it was built. Like many other social architecture efforts of the time, its future inhabitants were encouraged to participate in the self-construction and design of their homes. In a collective effort between Mexican and American architects, students from the state university, and the working-class families who responded to the call,² the complex was erected without architectural plans in one year. The difference between this experiment and other “progressive” models of the 1970s lies in the ideas behind its construction: beauty, emotion, and wholeness as possible catalysts to individualize each of the houses and as a response to what Alexander called “soulless” modular mass housing developments.

Influenced by the biological world, computer science, and mereology, Alexander and his collaborators aimed to develop an adaptive, “beautiful” and “human” system. But the slow “learning” process of the families contrasted with the urgent demand to solve the housing crisis of the time. The unfinished, “naïve and rudimentary” appearance of their facades, and the lack of plans, caused friction with government authorities who initially encouraged the effort and eventually suspended the construction. Only five of the thirty planned houses were completed. Since then, the experiment has been the subject of multiple critiques and eulogies. Today, Alexander’s theory and the transformation of the houses by their residents raise a debate about social architecture, as well as its aspirations and failures in relation to larger contexts: reflections addressed by the texts commissioned for this INSITE Journal_07: A Timeless Way to Build.

However, the Mexicali project has also been shaped by other microhistories. The distinctive feature of the architectural complex was a builder’s yard that served as the true site of experimentation. There, Christopher Alexander’s pattern system was tested, and an artisanal factory of blocks modeled with local earth was established; columns were erected, and the first basket-shaped roofs were woven. Colloquially called “El Sitio,” the builder’s yard was the physical model for the cluster, and a “nucleus” intended to establish an organic relationship with the community. The courtyard also served as a loggia and social gathering center, in addition to being the temporary home-residence for Alexander and the architects of Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Structure. Ideally, it would later become a “community center, school, church, dance center, cafe” or a “local art center” with artists who would become part of the community, first perhaps in a “frivolous” way, and gradually “with serious artists” who would contribute considerably to the environment.³

In 2022, while Mexicali-based artist Pastizal Zamudio was developing a project for INSITE, they realized that their childhood home was featured in a publication⁴: a cluster with vaulted ceilings that turned out to be the same builder’s yard as the Mexicali Experiment. During their first visits after twenty years, Zamudio rediscovered a space that is far from an architectural ruin. Like the remaining houses of the original project that are still inhabited, today “El Sitio” is in use; it is an industrious but modest university health clinic that serves its neighbors. Some of the old patterns: benches as stairs, arches, “wings of light,” and a semi- hidden garden coexist with laminated windows and air conditioning machinery. To conceive a site-specific work, Zamudio used their former bedroom as an artist’s studio and studied the aesthetic, social, and spiritual theory of Alexander. In a short time, Zamudio brought together neighbors, artists, laborers, and architects, and temporarily transformed “El Sitio” back into a construction yard. With the intention of returning the experimental cluster’s interior courtyard to its original condition, Zamudio conceived the work Before the Last Rubble, in the Face of Dawn (2038),⁵ a garden of more than one hundred hand-molded paving stones, conceived from Alexander’s philosophical ideas. Its public opening was part of a three-day conversation on social housing, vernacular architecture, and human settlements on the border.⁶

In the opening lines of the book The Production of Houses⁷ dedicated to the Mexicali project, Alexander refers to the urgent need for housing on a global scale, through the 1976 United Nations Habitat I Conference.⁸Devoted to human settlements, it was concluded that the entire world was experiencing “the greatest and fastest migration of people into cities and towns in history” in an environment of “inequalities in living conditions, social segregation, racial discrimination... the breakdown of social relationships and traditional cultural values.” Years earlier, at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, “Progress and the Harmony of Humanity,” architecture seemed to envision a future that was going against the grain of this reality. Osaka was a “testing ground for ambitious social experiments” that astonished the public with new metabolist complexes, aerial cities, and spaceship-shaped pavilions. As guest architects at the US pavilion, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues from the Center for Environmental Structure also envisioned a “city of the future,” through eighty collages cut out and crafted from the patterns, activities, and needs of each urban subculture. “We believe that the city will not be human until it is created by all the people who live in it. For this to happen, all members of society must have access to design patterns that are simply expressed, easy to share and easy to criticize.”⁹ The Mexicali experimental project, which this Journal explores from different microhistories, perhaps could be considered as a social model of a “community of the future” that is still unfolding and being built from the daily patterns, activities, and needs of its inhabitants.

About this edition

This Journal brings together new essays, artist and architectural commissions, and conversations that take as a point of departure a reconsideration of the issues raised by the Mexicali Experiment.

For the IN FOCUS section, Georgina Cebey traces the contrasting scenario between the sprawling 1970s industrial border town of Mexicali and Christopher Alexander’s ideas; Dorit Fromm explores the cluster as a model for social participation and the countercultural legacy of the cohousing community; and Felipe Orensanz and Alejandro Peimbert set out the political and social context of the Mexican housing agenda that, according to the authors, Alexander seemingly overlooked in developing his Mexicali experiment. The ARTIST COMMISSIONS features Pastizal Zamudio’s work, Before the Last Rubble, in the Face of Dawn (2038), a therapeutic garden comprised of one hundred handmade stones in the central courtyard of the Mexicali complex—detailed in the essay “The Mexicali Experiment.” Also included in this journal is a selection of artist Cynthia Hooper’s detailed paintings and drawings depicting the current appearance of the houses and builder’s yard of the Mexicali project. In ESSAYS, AJ Kim associates Alexander’s controversial notion of beauty with contemporary sites of war and conflict, and Nancy Kwak makes visible the existing class divisions and segregation affecting Southern California’s unhoused urban dwellers and their self-built shelters in public spaces. The VIEWPOINTS interview with Alison B. Hirsch follows her interest in socio-political forms of occupation and alternative experiments in the California environment. CONVERSATIONS presents a selection from the three-day conference in May 2023 with Georgina Cebey, CRO Studio (Adriana Cuéllar and Marcel Sánchez), Teddy Cruz, Alejandro D’Acosta, Howard Davis, AJ Kim, Michael Mehaffy, Felipe Orensanz, and Lorenia Urbalejo dedicated to concepts of vernacular dwelling, social architecture, and spatial justice. The event took place in a pavilion commissioned by INSITE with Mexicali-based architecture studios Veintedoce and Localista.

The photographic archives of The Mexicali Project of this Journal include original images generously provided by Howard Davis, Dorit Fromm and Peter Bosselmann, and the Center for Environmental Structure, through Maggie Moore Alexander and Artemis Anninou.