Rudy Argote (RA) Alexander talks about the urgency of changing the way we build. He talks about looking more at the community and the environment. I want to start by talking about this context.

Alejandro D’Acosta (AD) To talk about context in Mexicali is to talk about a new city, an extreme climate, the Colorado River, our homeland, and the Imperial Valley.
It seems important to me to understand that we are determined by context—to understand that it is the countryside that invades the city and not the other way around. I have been thinking a lot about this idea of patterns and participatory systems.

And I think that one of the most interesting differences of participatory systems is to take the differences in order to create a unity. So, personally, I have a hard time with the system of patterns, which I find false or erratic, because they are understood as they relate to construction and not to the voids. Because architecture, which is nothing more than a language, talks about things that do not exist.

Adriana Cuéllar (AC) Architecture or urbanism, for us here on the border, are processes of recycling—not just the recycling of material, but the idea of constantly adapting and reimagining our context. The example of Christopher Alexander has been extremely important and relevant to see how these processes are generative through design, how to understand the city through this lens that constantly nourishes us.

Marcel Sánchez (MS) The question of the region or the border is an idea of understanding each other, of negotiating, of knowing, and creating a dialog. In this sense, the architecture of design is also a question of always building a series of design principles that are in a constant dialogue, which is a dialogue with the people. Now, I find it a little difficult, honestly, to think that sometimes we have these formulas that come and tell us about our context, about what we should see through a different lens.

I believe it is a problem to think that the architect is the solution or that the architect is going to solve certain things. The vast majority of the city is not built by us, by the architects. Housing is what generates communities—the idea of having something that moves us and brings us out to be able to participate with it.

RA Several of the things you mentioned just now have something to do with Alexander’s thinking. Marcel, Adriana, what role can we take as architects to not only solve functional or community problems, but also to be agents of change in systemic problems?

AC In this region, buildings are being constructed, at least in Tijuana, that are quite dense and vertical. So, how can we get to these big questions that have to do with very basic architectural elements: a staircase, a bench, a public space, a kitchen and a window, and at the same time be related to practical problems such as water pollution, territory, land delimitation?

AD The first mistake is to think that architecture is the city—that we have to build in the city and create communal spaces, when what is communal and community oriented is to go back to the origin. Speaking of the vernacular, which is part of what is important here, is to understand that ancestral systems are created by nature, so I think the first mistakes are to understand nature and housing separately. We keep thinking that we build a building and then we put in a garden, when in fact we need a garden to live in. We do not need to make systems, as Alexander said, but what we need to make are ecosystems.

MS We must make ecological systems, I agree. But the ecosystem is not just an organic form. The ecosystem is us, how we live, and the circumstances that follow. Christopher Alexander raised a concern about scale, a concern about time, and a concern about the relationship that we create, not just physically, but with the relationship that we have to a context.

AD In our office we talk a lot about grace, imperfection, causality, but above all about the methodology of contextual architecture. Because the context is the plants, the granulometry, the soil, the tectonics, the wind, the sun, the migration; it is what happens to us as a species, so there are no patterns that are determined counter-regionally, much less counter-culturally. If I cross from the United States to be here, we are not just any border: we are the cultural border of everything that happens downward and upward, we are the border of Latin America.

MS I think the region is a hybridization: we are constantly redefining what our region is. Many of us were born here, but the vast majority come from other parts and come with other cultures, come with knowledge and we absorb it. This way of living is always trying to negotiate this cultural question that makes us be on this border. I think architecture is also a reflection of that. The human value that we have and that value that we have as humanity is extremely important, that we also understand it as an architecture. We are architecture, we are part of architecture, we generate architecture.