When Christopher Alexander and his team broke ground on the Mexicali Experimental Project in March of 1976, housing was at the top of Mexico’s national priorities. During the previous decade, the country had hit its all-time population growth peak, and the mounting pressure on its housing stock was spiraling into a nationwide crisis.¹In response, during the 1970s, the federal government launched an unprecedented housing strategy underpinned by a host of gargantuan institutions and norms, including the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit), the Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers (Fovissste), the Secretariat of Human Settlements and Public Works (Sahop), and the General Law of Human Settlements.²

            Bolstered by this new institutional framework and a booming economy, the government began building affordable housing at record speed.³ Throughout the 1970s, new high-density multifamily developments—the signature typology of the Mexican welfare state—popped up all over the country. Projects like Infonavit Iztacalco, El Rosario, and Integración Latinoamericana picked up the tradition of the pioneering housing experiments of the 1950s and ’60s—like Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán, Unidad Independencia, and Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco-Tlatelolco—while exploring with new scales, densities, and uses.⁴Aware that new housing alone wasn’t enough to keep pace with the country’s changing demographics, the government also began tackling the problem of the rampant informal settlements through a series of new agencies, such as the National Institute for Community Development and Affordable Housing (Indeco) in 1970, the Commission for Land Tenure Regularization (Corett) in 1974, and the National Fund for Affordable Housing (Fonhapo) in 1981.

        Grassroots groups, most notably Movimiento Urbano Popular, had garnered significant political leverage after years of struggles and were providing thousands of families with access to land, housing, and essential services through self-help and mutual aid networks.⁵ NGOs like Centro Operacional de Vivienda y Poblamiento (Copevi) were exploring alternative design processes and forms of living in community-based projects like the Palo Alto housing cooperative in Mexico City.⁶ Scholars like Oscar Lewis, William Mangin, Luis Unikel, Larissa Lomnitz, Gustavo Garza, and Martha Schteingart were conducting groundbreaking research on human settlements from multiple disciplinary approaches,⁷ and academic groups like Escuela Nacional de Arquitectura-Autogobierno were opening up spaces of political resistance that put housing issues into new and radical perspectives. In addition, countless writers, filmmakers, and photographers were chronicling the everyday lives of Mexico’s middle and lower classes, and adding additional layers to the ongoing debates on housing—for example, in Armando Ramírez’s novel Chin Chin el Teporocho, Carlos Monsiváis’s collection of essays Días de guardar, Gabriel Vargas’s comic strip La Familia Burrón, or Gustavo Alatriste’s film Quien Resulte Responsable, housing and the built environment assumed the form of protagonist.

However, during his crusade south of the border, Alexander expressed little, if any, interest in these or other ideas. It wasn’t for lack of information, as Alexander was certainly up to date with the events of his time. In fact, in the opening pages of The Production of Houses, an account—part manifesto, part logbook, part memoir, part manual—of his days down in Mexicali, he recognized “the value of many of the efforts people are making to solve ‘the housing problem.’”⁸ However, as soon as Alexander set foot in Mexico, he not only turned a blind eye to any ideas other than his own but dismissed as well any preexisting ways of knowing. Throughout his writings, Alexander depicts Mexicali—and Mexico in general—as something of a cultural and technological wasteland, run by a failed state and inhabited by a backward society that built “without knowledge” and therefore had to “be guided and taught how to design and build their own home.”⁹ Luuckily for them, Alexander was there to teach “the rules for making houses.”¹⁰On paper, the “Alexander Method,” as Philip Tabor once labeled it,¹¹ was a horizontal and participatory “process in which families design their own houses."¹² However, most of the rules turned out to be nonnegotiable. For example, the representative of each family had to be an active member of ISSSTECALI—Baja California’s Institute of Social Security and Social Services for Government Workers. They had to earn at least 5,000 Mexican pesos per month, not own a house, be married, and have at least two children. Families would live in Conjunto Urbano Orizaba, a shantytown in the westernmost outskirts of the city. The state government would provide loans for land, and Issstecali would give each family a loan of 40,000 pesos to build their homes (approximately $3,500 US dollars at the time). Finally, teams from the Center for Environmental Structure and the Autonomous University of Baja California’s School of Architecture would provide any required technical assistance.¹³

The families would live together in a single cluster, arrange their homes around a central courtyard, and design their houses using Alexander’s A Pattern Language.¹⁴ The process was to be overseen by an “architect-builder,” who was, in Alexander’s words, a “new kind of professional who takes responsibility for the functions which we now attribute to the architect, and also, for the functions which we now attribute to the contractor”—the “backbone” and “kingpin” of the process, someone who “controls” the system of construction.¹⁵ A “builder’s yard,” considered to be “the physical counterpart of the architect-builder” and located across the street from where the five houses would eventually stand, was to provide “a physical anchor point: a source of information, tools, equipment, materials, and guidance.”¹⁶ There, families would learn different “techniques of earth- concrete construction and thin-shell, lightweight, concrete vaults” that Alexander claimed to have invented years earlier¹⁷ and manufacture custom interlocking blocks with an Italian Rosacometta block press imported expressly for the project.

                During the months of the design- build process, everyone seemed to follow the rules and play along. However, once the hustle and bustle waned and everyday life kicked in, the culture shock between Alexander’s worldview and the families’ customs and practices became evident. For example, in a city accustomed to single-family living, the common land—which, Alexander later admitted, he and his team “played a major role in defining”¹⁸—was soon split into five private backyards. In a society where houses adapt over time to ever-changing households and tend to grow vertically, the vaulted roofs became a hurdle almost impossible to overcome (for example, to add a second story to their home, the Reyes family built an entirely new metal frame around the original house). And in a country where, at the time, close to seven out of every ten families self-built their homes using whatever they could find at their local hardware store, Alexander’s experimental blocks proved incompatible with the standard building materials available for future additions.¹⁹

                These mismatches reveal far more than mere accidental oversights. In more ways than one, they are an expression of the deliberate omissions that support and give meaning to Alexander’s discourse. Against the blank backdrop behind which Alexander concealed others’ ideas, his theories appeared unique, revolutionary, and, most importantly, urgent. In an unapologetic 1986 review of The Production of Houses, Reyner Banham accurately pointed out that Alexander’s southern journey was driven by “some hidden agenda over and above the provision of better housing for urban Mexicans.”²⁰ But Alexander’s agenda was hiding in plain sight, as the summary on the book’s jacket suggests: “This new book in the series puts Alexander’s theories to the test and shows what sort of production system can create the kind of environment Alexander has envisioned.” In this sense, Mexicali was less an end than a means to an end. It was, as the summary continues, “only the starting point for a comprehensive theory of housing production.”

                Alexander’s housing theories were contradictory at best. The Mexicali Experimental Project was built at a time when radical thinkers across Latin America, from Ivan Illich to Paulo Freire, were questioning how we produce and distribute knowledge in modern societies, and anarchists like John F.C. Turner and Colin Ward were calling for a radical dismantling of power structures within the built environment. While Alexander threaded his vision with a fierce critique of the authoritarianism of state- and market-based housing systems, he failed to see the hierarchical nature of his counterproposal.²¹ In the fourth and final part of The Production of Houses—fittingly titled “The Shift of Paradigm”—Alexander concludes: “We finally come face to face, then, with the unavoidable fact that the system of production which we have described really does describe an entirely new type of reality. It describes a new ‘something’ which is essentially a new social system.”²² Ironically, the Mexicali Experimental Project eventually put Alexander “face to face” with a different “unavoidable fact”—that one cannot foster a “shift of paradigm” by neglecting the existing social system and imposing a new one.