I could say a few more critical things about Christopher Alexander’s philosophy as an architect: a critique, for example, of how even socially conscious architects might fall fallacy to the image of themselves as small gods creating something out of nothing in “empty space,” but I will say only that within Alexander’s work there is an ethos of British colonial belief in orderly beauty, symmetry, and prioritization of controlled forms of “nature.” To imagine that he is a 1970s pioneer of any kind, even in the social housing sector, as the first to have realized that human wellness is connected to the natural environment, is a deeply colonial presumption that dismisses Indigenous knowledges, ways of being, and ways of building.

This privileging is a wider reflection of the fields of architecture and planning during this time, and representative of historically constituted colonial standards within architecture and city planning that continue to privilege Western and European perspectives. This is not to say that I disagree with Alexander’s notion that the physicality of our built and natural environments can produce a wellness of being, and therefore also further unwellness. Who we are as humans moving through our various environments, our subjectivities, our identities, and cultural and social formations matter because we (as people, and not just designers, planners, or architects) are always both being shaped by and shaping the spaces that we live in and relate to.

                In this regard, the Mexicali Experiment was a radical exercise in creating a form of social housing that could be adaptive, not just to its natural environment but to a “public” who is not often seen as having design agency or design privilege. Alexander’s initial intervention with Mexicali as a social housing experiment considered the local context of the families who would live there, and paid particular attention to the climate and environment of arid Mexicali from a design perspective that incorporated the raw materials of the land and local resources. However, Alexander offers a specifically British colonial understanding and idea of beauty as symmetrical, hence the repetition of the circular shape, which I would like to utilize to reframe the conversation around the housing complex as it was built in 1975–76, and as it became later—perhaps a reason why despite Alexander’s hopes, it did not “scale up.”

                Thus, Alexander’s vision for the space and ideas about the integrability of the natural history and beauty of the land are visible within the design of the Mexicali Experiment. I found most significant his retroactive insight about the project roughly seven years after its design, in 1984.¹ In his reflection of what changes had been made to the site there is a rather colonial attitude that in his view, the families living in the community had “spoiled” the integrity of the design. This colonial belief is twofold: that design itself is pure and must be “timeless” (never changing), and that the outsider [white] can know what is best for the local [native]. We see this both in and outside of architecture as a historically based set of knowledges that has privileged European, and often specifically British, ways of “knowing” the land and knowing what should come to that land, as well as how that land should be managed. We see these ideas repeated still today, as a point of conflict in both colonial and decolonial movements, currently, worldwide.

                But one of Alexander’s great contributions to architecture, stemming perhaps from his ability to integrate the beauty he pays such close attention to in the recurring symmetry of natural organisms at the microbiological level, is that he (1984) is eventually willing to embrace the adaptations, mutations, and modifications that the housing complex in this short passage of time begins to embody. In this sense the site becomes a more living object, and his design even more successful—a certain openness was intended, which did allow for humanness to thrive. This evidence of humanness in the space, or its “spoils,” make the space more whole, we could say. Certainly, in terms of its usefulness and useability for the original tenants. And that, too, should be how we measure and understand beauty: over time do we see evidence of the asymmetrical disorder of life that results in modifications suited to its residents? Do we see the house becoming a home through its bulges, blemishes, its unsightly growths? The design context is and must always be changing. “The city is not a tree”, but the city grows just the same.²

                Look to Cruz and Forman’s (2020) analysis that connects the future hope for an “Open Gaza,” for example, to the contentiousness of the US-Mexico border, which also very much constitutes the built and “natural” landscape for Mexicali as a place. If Mexicali is naturally (by nature, via its border location, and its raw material) a place that is quite porous, then it is the border wall that is fantasy (and perhaps should have no place). This is an example as to how there is more to symmetry than physical design. Symmetry in those more physical elements of the Mexicali Experiment ignored the “asymmetries of [social, economic, and political] power,” as Cruz and Forman put it, are always present within built and natural spaces. Asymmetries of power are particularly perilous to ignore in border places such as Mexicali, and the Gaza Strip, and many other natural/ unnatural places across the world. If the Mexicali housing complex today does not exist in its intended form, as an early intervention in social housing, perhaps it is because it did not incorporate an understanding of this asymmetry of power, even as the site reflects a beautiful symmetry of design in its uniformity, in its domes, in its ecological (but not social) compatibility with the native physical landscape.

                Gazan architect Salem Al Qudwa ponders further on how Palestinians, forcefully enclosed within Gaza, demonstrate constant construction and reconstruction out of necessity. There is power in ongoing Palestinian resilience and adaptability. Within Gaza is frequent design-based defiance of structure in order to participate in the process of everyday planning under both material (as in literal building blocks) and corporeal (as in embodied) restrictions. Al Qudwa describes, “In Gaza, however, we find yet another aspect of the “ordinary” that has to do with the reduction of everyday life to a bare minimum where access to fuel, electricity, and other basic needs is not free, but restricted by Israel, whose control of the Gaza Strip’s theoretical borders is absolute.”³

                I interpret the image above to depict a Palestinian child in a newly constructed/reconstructed home in Gaza. He is in the process of creating a built-in ladder to enter his home through the opening of a window; a window that perhaps for his small frame is also an excellent entryway. In this image is simultaneously the design (intended) and the redesign (unintended) of this small everyday architect, appropriate to his needs and his point of view on what changes add to the efficiency and accessibility of the space. The right to redesign one’s own home, pictured above, seems like such a small victory and yet so few beyond a particular class are seen as entitled to this right. Public housing, as it dominates the architectural landscape, is easily identified by its design uniformity but also by the design components that exist to facilitate tight social control. The poor should not get to choose—this message is often communicated through the form of the building itself, or as Alexander himself puts it: “the dead and lifeless quality of modern housing projects is well known” (1984).

            The “right to the city,”⁴ for many people today, remains in violent contestation (Santos Junior, 2014).⁵ The concept and context of the right to “home” at the US-Mexico border is a policy failure of global proportions that produces mass deaths on both sides of the wall. As Cruz and Forman write, “border walls, and border policies, are often self-inflicted wounds on the border-builders themselves, since they frequently interrupt the environmental, economic, and social flows that are essential to the health and sustainability of the larger region” (2020).⁶ Every rendition of the US border fence is a design success and design failure in that the wall is both surmountable and unsurmountable, thus calling into question its own purpose, while it continues to harm the land and the people, physically, politically, and environmentally.

            Returning to the moment of Christopher Alexander’s reflection regarding the Mexicali Experiment, I do believe that his own realization is a critically important one: design does not supersede function, and beauty takes on many forms both within “nature” and inside our own humanity. While first he may have felt a sense of offense to his false consciousness regarding the purity of his intentions that prioritized a symmetry of design over a symmetry of power, it seems that he reached the understanding that the people who live in a place have the right to create and re-create their homes as well as author their own stories—and that is precisely what makes a place more, not less, suitable for humans. That ability to adapt and change may correlate to a resident’s feelings of changes in their own sense of power.

            The Mexicali housing complex was designed to be appropriate to the hot, dry, natural landscape of the city, as accessible to low- income communities with a hopefulness in mind to its scalability as a form of social housing. It was designed with an efficiency of natural resources—that is, a model experiment in contemporary ideals about “ecological” and “appropriate” architecture for low-income housing. Where the site was limited is where architecture and planning are still limited. In not truly accounting for past and current power differentials between the designer and designed, between local and not-local, between occupier and colonized, and so on, the longevity of the housing we think people need (and what they actually need) is compromised by the failures of our own imaginations. Sometimes what we imagine, what we create, what we allow to be recreated is powerful because it is as Al Qudwa says, “Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian – a plea for the un-monumental and the anti-heroic.”⁷