Under the sun. This is where their body resists long hours, uninterrupted, until their hands forget they are harvesting something, and their eyes begin to see a landscape instead of an agricultural field. These landscapes are not vast, horizontal and arresting as in the American West, but more like grasslands that shiver, a split floret abandoned under a rock, or a young branch in the shape of an elbow that are found through random walking. Pastizal calls these wanderings choreographic displacements, or “the result of long-term solar performativities in marijuana and broccoli fields.” While gleaning in the furrows, the artist creates small acts of disobedience: by placing aluminum flowers on miniature sticks, sculpting mud with their fingers into irregular shapes, or covering the sun with their thumb and other found objects. Their presence, both as artist and undocumented farmworker, often becomes invisible, diluted among the countryside, the mountains, and the wild meadows they sporadically inhabit at night.

I encountered Pastizal Zamudio’s work for the first time in a cultural center in Tijuana, Baja California. This was an unusual place to exhibit their work because the artist’s ideas are mostly ephemeral and hidden in the farmlands on the other side of the border. The installation I saw was like the abandoned settlement of a nomad, whose basins, branches, and clay sculptures had been left behind. On one of the sides, a large fabric stretched on two wooden poles featured a repeated image of an irregular star. A star that could be a sun, or a star drained by the sun. Was it only its vanishing shadow? At the time, Pastizal was not yet Pastizal. Back then, the artist used the moniker Miyata Hisanori, a name stolen from a graveyard.

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It is like a dance, like dancing a building; this is the art of construction.¹
Christopher Alexander

No one in their right mind would want to realize utopias because they are personal dreams not anchored in reality, wrote architect Christopher Alexander in the late sixties. Planners, on the other hand, did not offer a complete vision of a better future because they relied only on data. Modern architects, he argued, produced ugly, alienated buildings that were “fucking up the world.”² Alexander’s insatiable search to design buildings with feeling, that could be beautiful and alive at the same time, became like a philosopher’s quest for the truth. The Center for Environmental Structure, which he and his colleagues founded in 1967—at the height of an era consumed by cybernetics, environmentalism, and do-it-yourselfism— could be dismissed as yet another counter-architectural Berkeley venture. But his experiments, like the one in the border town of Mexicali, are still alive after fifty years.

                I had never heard of Alexander, the father of the celebrated and polemic pattern language, the prodigy behind 1960s computer design, the stubborn nostalgic architect searching for a timeless way of building, and the beloved progressive outcast teacher at Berkeley. The people who live in and use his buildings may not know who he is, but those who still live at the housing cluster in Mexicali at least know that their homes were built by their own parents and grandparents with their bare hands in the seventies; that the five houses where they wake up every morning required that their own families shovel the earth, assemble the windows, erect columns, and learn how to weave the basket roofs that shelter them from Mexicali’s dry, scorching weather. This must create something special in their minds. Even when the cluster is no longer a cluster, but a maze of gates, grids, and concrete that reveals the afterlife of the romantic human process that once brought them to life.

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Many months of unsuccessful searching for Miyata Hisanori went by. Without a face, only an asymmetrical, distorted sun star remained in my mind. Anonymity and ambiguity make us obsessive, not being able to name things, to say where they come from, like Alexander’s timeless way, or his infatuation with the “quality without a name,”³ that, according to him, is what gives souls to buildings.

                This installation haunted me. Difficult to put into words, but it was remote and futuristic at the same time. And then, I saw the tractor, a tractor with a warped star fixed to its windshield. It resembled a perilous spider with elongated legs. The person behind the photo was Pastizal Zamudio, another name that alludes to the landscape and the vegetation that regenerates at dawn. On our first encounter, Pastizal brought a Mary Poppins-style bag from which they delicately pulled out small amulets, stamps, talismans, tokens, drawings, trinkets, and photographs, most of them collected during their trips between Mexico and the US, and connected through serendipity, destiny, and karma. With a voice of velvet, Pastizal spoke about phenomena, breathing, walking, and undocumented events: solar studies, wax tears buried on a mountain, light reflections in trees and stones, and ethereal dreams. Also, about irregular stars that their father saw on the wall before dying. Stars, he asserted, that were shadows of horsemen riding. At the time, I hadn’t read Alexander’s Luminous Ground (2004), where he details why a “crude and jagged” star that he attached to a barn created a more profound being than a regular star. The different lengths and angles somehow brought the building to life: “This is the spirit. This is the contact with the I,”⁴ he wrote.

In February 2022, I invited Pastizal to undertake a new art commission that would involve writing/ creating a journal following their own process as wanderer and worker on both sides of the border, and letting time and circumstances decide what would come out of it. They immediately accepted.

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                Once Alexander discovered morphogenesis— or how organisms develop their form—he tailored it to his 1970s theories and research to design our physical environment as a living entity. The architect diagrammed the social fabric of cities by assembling ritual, economic, and cultural activities while trying to find the genetic code in buildings. He discovered inherent properties in nature such as scale, repetition, boundaries, symmetries, and echoes that could be applied to vernacular thinking, and he analyzed the interconnectedness of infinitesimal acts at the molecular level and their ability to create units or wholes. His diagrams and theories influenced the computer generation and contributed to the tech revolution of the era, but he was more concerned with how architecture could contribute to social change and a way of living that was not alienated by tract housing developments in barren landscapes.

                “Just to give you an idea of what I mean by generative system: you see, one of the most interesting building projects that I ever did, a very primitive one in Mexico,” Alexander said. “The Mexicali workers’ housing?” asked architect Rem Koolhaas in an interview. “Yes!” replied Alexander: “I achieved a unique building system which I have not yet ever been able to replicate in other contexts.”⁵ And he continues to explain how the system unfolded step by step, how it was cheap and simple, enabling houses to be different according to the needs of the families, and how these families’ members wove baskets using lath strips to make vaults that resulted in different shapes with funny angles. When Koolhaas confessed that there was a contradiction in the purity of the process versus the ambition to empower people, Alexander remarked: “It isn’t quite like that. Look, my real aim is: I want the earth to be beautiful.”⁶

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            Due to the absence of a signal in remote countrysides, Zamudio’s messages arrived at dawn. Images were delivered to me in fragments: hands holding miniature translucent sculptures, feathers like ghosts in inhospitable landscapes, silicone gelatin dripping from their fingers. There were also fragments of songs, images of clouds, or of hands holding things against a passenger’s window. Questions that haunted me at the time were how to speak of a territory from the vision of both the nomad and the sedentary. How does walking in a place unsettle and change the land? Are we only inhabitants of a thin surface?

            Pastizal is both nomad and sedentary; they are inhabitants of the “Californias.” As native of the Mexican north and wanderer-laborer of the American south. Mexicali is a city that was once traced by its cotton fields and the remnants of the Colorado River. Today, its modern agricultural industry is still expanding, but it is the fuming maquiladoras that have reshaped the city into a factory conurbation, with cheap labor enabling the assembly of turbines and cars, the production of agrochemicals, or the packing of food for China. In the US, California produces over a third of the country’s vegetables, which are predominantly harvested by Mexicans.

                During their travel, Pastizal’s boots absorb the mud from the US fields which is then unintentionally dispersed as dust in Mexico. But what really matters is what goes beyond the physical world; because what Pastizal moves back and forth is not the dust, but a telepathic energy, almost like an extrasensory aura that manifests through walking in erratic fields, through hypnagogic acts of breathing and listening, through caring cautiously for the fragile herbaceous foliage under the sun. Their home most probably appears during their acts of levitation.

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                “A house is not just a shell to be inhabited; it is also an unfolding of our experience,”⁷ Alexander wrote in 1973, at a time when he was struggling to find a way of building that did not impose itself on the earth but was attuned to its cosmology. Contrary to what many assumed, the architect believed that machines and technology could be part of this symbiotic system, that computation and cybernetics were tools for finding the wholeness he had been searching for all his life. His research on systems and the pursuit of harmony in fact took examples from “art, architecture, embryology, physics, astrophysics, drawing, crystallography, meteorology, the dynamics of living systems, and ecology.”⁸ His interest in ancient structures, cathedrals, and medieval cities arose from their inherent quality, contrasting with our era of barren spirituality “infected by banality.”⁹ Thus, the vernacular approach of the pattern language and the architect’s future interest in finding the meaning of architecture in consciousness, soul, religion, and love. This is why in his theories, wholeness is a process continuously unfolding, always incomplete. In relation to Mexicali, Alexander wrote that “the houses are never finished; they exist, in an imperfect state, constantly changing and improving, just as we ourselves also exist in an imperfect state, constantly struggling to improve ourselves.”¹⁰

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One early morning, on February 3, 2022, Pastizal sent me an image of what appeared to be a cluster of houses. I asked what they were, and they replied, “a community project from the seventies and my first home in Mexicali,” adding, “I think it was built by a famous architect named Christopher Alexander.”

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A month later, on March 17, 2022, Christopher Alexander died of pneumonia at eighty-five years old in Binsted, United Kingdom.

my first interaction with the house after twenty years was to draw a sun over the skylight in what used to be the bedroom of my parents
Pastizal Zamudio

                Pastizal’s first home was originally not built as a house, but as a builder’s yard, conceived in every housing project by Alexander as the experimental site. This is the place where every part is crafted and assembled, and where one-to-one scale models are tested, giving the dwellers an opportunity to learn from the process as they become the builders themselves. The finished rooms are then used by the resident architects. The complex creates a strong center, where everyone eats and socializes at the end of the day. After the project is concluded, it can be used as a community center. In the “Mexican experiment”—built across the street from the five houses—it was, according to Alexander, the physical and spiritual starting point of the whole process, “laid out as carefully as—perhaps even more carefully than— the houses themselves that would later follow.” ¹¹

                When Pastizal returned to this site of their first home, I went with them. It seemed like the arches and niches they remembered were still in the alcoves, as well as the small secret compartments that they now rediscovered with their adult hands. Flashbacks of an earlier time appeared, even when their parents’ bedroom had been turned into an obstetrics ward, and the corridors were covered with signs of emergency exits and toxic materials warnings. The building gave the impression of being in intensive care itself, surrounded by electrical wiring, pierced by new metal doors, and plastered with several coats of paint since it was built in 1975-76. The aspiring health care practitioners walked through the central courtyard, but hastily, as the Mexicali heat forced them inside, where they had recently installed air conditioning.

                The metal plaque remains at the entrance. It reads something like this: “El Sitio. Prototype home built between 1975–1976. Research project lead by Christopher Alexander. In 2005, it was rebuilt and rehabilitated to install the Community Center by the Faculty of Medicine.” There is something about plaques that enshrine places, yet there is no story about Pastizal’s family as tenants, nor of the squatters that were evicted by the university in the late nineties so that Pastizal’s family could come live here. History is often elusive and fugitive. But above all, always incomplete. Some of Pastizal’s neighbors—the sons and daughters of the five families who built the houses in the seventies—still recognize Pastizal’s face. One of them kindly opened the door of his tiny home for us. Inside, we saw the woven dome, now covered with paint, as if it was a cast over a curved vertebral spine; we saw remnants from the soil-cement blocks that have resisted Mexicali’s cyclic earthquakes; and we saw the newspapers from the seventies peeling off from the vaulted ceilings, as if the remote past was geological strata sedimenting the building.

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            Pastizal’s father passed away a few years ago due to a respiratory illness. He was not able to see how his home was transformed into a health clinic. Or how his child, now an artist, was able to sleep in their room again, climb into the vaulted ceilings, and listen to the murmur of the building’s cracks at night. He was also not able to witness how Pastizal removed the new built- in cement in the central courtyard, to replace it instead with a ground, a luminous ground with more than one hundred clay stones molded with their bare hands.

                As an architect and teacher who spoke proudly with his students about his house having been built by Alexander, he would’ve known that Pastizal’s stones and the cracks between them are not accidents, but patterns, “spontaneous gardens” that are shaped in the form of irregular stars. He most probably would recognize that the bench his child and one neighbor made with an electric street pole, in what used to be their garden, is an element central to Alexander’s thinking. To reach the quality without a name, “a building must be made, at least in part, of those materials which age and crumble. Soft tile and brick, and grass growing in the cracks between the stones.”¹² Alexander wrote.

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if sadness dwells in -unity- it is because the “living centers” are beings that use integumentary systems based on emotions christopher says that we can feel sadness in a column
Pastizal Zamudio

Beauty is innocent, it appears when people forget themselves, when people who make things do not care what people think of them.^{Idem, The Luminous Ground.}
Christopher Alexander

                It’s true that Pastizal used Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building book as an oracle and guide for their project, as if their small actions in the building were dictated by cleromancy. It is also true that there were many coincidences when we started working at the university health center: that Pastizal’s room as a child was also “Chris’s room” when he came to build the project in the seventies; and that the health center had turned the very same room into a nursery and painted one of the walls with irregular stars.

                But before Pastizal decided to replace the new cement floor in the courtyard with paving stones to create a meditative garden, the artist traveled to California to see other of the architect’s houses, only to discover that, as in Mexicali, ornaments, columns, motifs, and lattices had also been carefully selected by Alexander to test his theories of wholes, positive spaces, gradients, roughness, and voids. But even before that, we both dedicated a year to reading Alexander. To understand that his pattern language is not an instruction manual, but a philosophy of life. That the “quality without a name” is only possible through a certain kinship with the world itself, and through the understanding that life is constantly emerging and interacting at every scale. That even if his theories often have an air of grandiosity or veiled utopianism, or possible hints of moralizing doctrines, they contain some truth, and perhaps questions that are timely.

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            We asked the university if they would let Pastizal remove the cement floor and make a new garden instead. For many months and without formal plans, neighbors came to help prepare the ground. Pastizal would spend their days and nights with The Production of Houses (1985) under their arm, touching surfaces, listening between the walls, thinking how the building resembled lungs made out of stone, breathing lungs getting air from the corridors and windows.

            A special kiln was built miles away to fire the stones—only thirteen at a time. Each one of them was kneaded and nurtured by the artist as if it were a living thing. Their former room, Chris’s room, was used as if it were an intensive care unit, with humidifiers and special ventilation that kept the stones safe from splintering from Mexicali’s heat, and to allow their porous surface to breathe the songs, and their velvet voice. The place became an experimental site again, where artists, neighbors, architects, and stonemasons came together to create a floor that became a garden for the nurses, for the students, and for the community. Perhaps no one will notice that Pastizal shaped each of the stones into irregular stars, and that their crevices are part of a living process.

            When Alexander’s students¹³ Dorit Fromm and Peter Bosselmann returned to Mexicali seven years later after the five houses were completed, the architect saw images of how the houses had been transformed: “It might make some architects uncomfortable that their work is being changed... When it was first finished, the housing there didn’t have the same quality of integration that it has now. Now it has reached a level of ordinariness that is better integrated into life and makes me very happy. This is the quality that is my real goal.”¹⁴

some crevices resemble mouths on the verge of muttering something,
cyclopes pronouncing mantras, under one of them
a caterpillar dances.

Pastizal Zamudio

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This text was first commissioned by curator Zeynep Öz as part of her YAZ publication series project for Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), February–May 2025.