Andrea Torreblanca (AT) Howard, you were part of the design and construction team for the Mexicali Project, and this had a great influence on your later work in terms of building culture. Can you talk about that experience and the influence of being here?

Howard Davis (HD) When I came here with Chris [Christopher Alexander], I didn’t really know much about housing. We didn’t only work on the construction of these houses. They were built in order to pay attention, close attention, to the needs of the families. So, the families were central to the project. And we developed new systems. We used the pattern language, which some people like, some people don’t. It was designed so that families themselves could build the houses. There was a system of blocks that fit into each other, and these blocks could be laid up without mortar, which made it easy for families. But there were also changes that were requested by the building department. Instead of submitting a set of plans of the buildings, what we did was to submit a set of what you might call standard details. There was a different way of doing the financing, because the money that each family was paying was different. So, the contracts had to be done according to the exact size of the house. So, all of that is not just architecture, it’s not just building, it has to do with what I eventually came to call the building culture, because the building culture involves all those processes of design, regulation, money, and all of it, right? But it was the experience here and thinking about what we did and what we didn’t do that got me thinking about the idea that people have a building culture. And we planted ourselves in the middle of it trying to redefine it. In thinking about the project afterwards, I realized that maybe there needed to have been more connection to the existing building culture of the place.

AT Felipe, I would like to ask you what we can learn or unlearn from this project. I think that at that time, in the seventies, there was an interest in building utopian communities, communal initiatives. What is the difference between this project and the ideology of the seventies?.

Felipe Orensanz (FO) Well, I think it is a project that we can learn a lot from. I think we need to look beyond its successes and failures. I would like to rescue the energy behind this project, not to lose sight of the fact that it started in the university. It was a very radical project for its time. Obviously, Christopher Alexander was not alone in his critical discourse. It was a moment of great critical, ideological, counter-hegemonic effervescence in which the traditional ways of producing housing, of making architecture, were being questioned. I think one of the problems with the criticisms that are sometimes made of Alexander is that he is not read. The Production of Houses is a book that is as important as the project itself, this strange book that is half manifesto, half manual, half memory of the project. He is betting on changing the system from the ground up. I would dare to say that it is one of Alexander’s most political books and projects.

AT I think Christopher Alexander was posing a question at the beginning of the book, which is the problem of housing.

HD I’ve been teaching architecture for a long time in Oregon, and I teach a lot of courses specifically about housing. And the first thing I say to students on day one is that to me the word housing connotes storage, and the word dwelling connotes living in a place. This is a little extreme, but actually the way in which housing has been dealt with largely in the twentieth century is as storage: the idea is to make as many houses as possible that are identical because the idea of mass production seems like it might be a good idea. Well, it’s not right. So, this distinction between storage and dwelling is also something that I think I learned from this project. I mean, we had five families. The family who lived on the right across the street on the left, this was the family of Macario Reyes. She decided that she wanted the children’s bedrooms to be bigger than normal. The family on the right belonged to a Lilia Durán. And her husband was a barber. He wanted to work at home, so we built a little barber shop in the house. The family behind Lilia was José Tapia. José had a brother who was living with them, so he had his own room. The point is, is that these people had individual lives, they were all human beings, but they were also different from each other. And our idea was that the houses that they built should have the ability to reflect who they are and what they thought they wanted.

AT I wanted to get to this point about the quality of life and how Alexander’s ideas on wholeness and well-being were also part of the process. How do these ideas transform the way of living? Howard, [the Mexicali Experiment] is a model that changed the idea of owning a house.

HD This was a long story, but the project was five houses on a site that would ordinarily be used for six. And what happened to the extra house was that we had this idea that—I agree is a utopian idea—the five families would share common land in the middle. The project was also including the existence of land and property that the families would actually own together and share together. And that to me was, in the end, one of the failures of the project because the common land does not exist anymore.

AT But today this space is a space for health. The community does come, and they do attend this place as a community space.

HD Well, that’s a great example of how a work of architecture can actually take on new uses in the future. In fact, it’s designed in a way where you are kind of predicting what kinds of uses those might be.

FO And I think we also must be fair to the project. The project did not have a total solution, but it’s viable. I mean, here are the houses as proof. I know they were built fifty years ago, [and] the method can be perfected; 70 percent of the cities are produced through similar processes of self-production. Not necessarily always self-construction, but they are somehow autonomous processes. What I especially appreciate in Alexander’s speech is that he understands the depth of the problem and that many of the issues, such as precarity and housing, to quote Engels, come from the bottom.

HD I think that one of the things about Alexander is that it’s important not only to look at his proposed solutions, but also to look at the fact that he has really done a great job in identifying what the problem is. And I think that to me, the identification of the problem is as important as the proposal of the solutions. I’ve been thinking about this project for a long, long time. I mean, architecture is not going to make you happy if you’re an unhappy person, nothing that Chris is going to do will make you happy. The question is, can the building not put a burden on you? I think today we’ve got too many buildings and too many places in cities that themselves create problems because of the way they’re designed. And this is true, particularly, if you start to think about inclusive urbanism.