In 1975, the architect Christopher Alexander made an unprecedented proposal to the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC): to develop a social housing project on the outskirts of the city of Mexicali, at the arid end of the Mexican desert. The university authorities, who had originally reached out to the architect to give a lecture, accepted his proposal.

            At the time, Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, was one of the country’s newest cities. Where houses, avenues, and factories stand today, 150 years ago, there was no city, not even a town. There were hardly any traces of human life when the city was officially founded in 1903.¹ Unlike other cities built on fertile ground and inhabited for centuries, Mexicali emerged almost by accident due to distant forces: the hydraulic projects in the United States that diverted the Colorado River allowed Mexicali and the adjacent Imperial Valley of California to become agricultural centers. Thus, thanks to the work of irrigation, the region went from being a desert where mesquite barely grew to an oasis where even cotton flourished.

            When Alexander arrived in Mexicali in 1975, the city had already gone through half a century of major social, political, and economic processes. Perhaps the most notable of which was the Agrarian Reform, which, during the presidency of Cárdenas (1934-40), involved land redistribution and the mass migration of Mexicans from other parts of the country in search of a piece of land. The redistribution model was based on the ejido, a collective form of land ownership that gave the so-called ejidatarios use of the land, but not its ownership, which remained in the hands of the state.

            However, starting in 1950, Mexicali gradually ceased to be an agricultural center and quickly became a city. The ejidos closest to the city center were paved over, agricultural workers left the fields for the factory, and canals were turned into avenues. Bureaucrats, retailers, and business leaders began playing an increasingly important role in the nascent city. Simultaneously, air conditioning enabled the construction of shopping malls and other urban infrastructure: characteristics of a Mexicali that was heading toward contemporary times. Despite the advances, around 1970 it could be said that the city had grown in an erratic and improvised way, as an out of control encampment in the desert. Bungalows, prefabricated houses, and a mix of construction techniques brought by migrants from different parts of Mexico gave Mexicali the sense of a transitory city that extended horizontally, a sort of unending sprawl like cities in the United States, driven by an infinite amount of land and the smuggling of cheap cars coming from the United States. In this scenario, there was an urgent need for new housing solutions for this atypical city, in which urban life and the rural world of the ejidos was in tension with a modernity that was strongly influenced by the United States.

        Upon arriving to the Valley of Mexicali, the architect Christopher Alexander was already a member of the faculty in the Department of Architecture at the University of Berkeley, California. His recent projects included a school in Bavra, India (1962); a set of four housing units in the Experimental Housing Project (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda, PREVI) of Peru (1971); the Community Mental Health Center in Modesto, California (1972); and the construction of the dining hall for the Sierra Designs factory in Berkeley, California (1975). His architectural practice came together with the ethos of California during the years of the hippie movement and end of the Vietnam War. For the California Bay Area, the 1960s and 1970s were years of rock and roll, but also of a series of philosophies that preached collective projects and living in community. Berkeley was an important epicenter of this rebellious environment, where the university revolved around a fierce collective spirit and students experimented with inhabiting through a series of housing cooperatives, such as Rochdale Village, one of the largest in the world. At the same time, there was an increasingly palpable need to build more housing in Mexicali: the constant increase of the urban population brought with it evils such as illegal land occupations, the proliferation of precarious residencies, and disordered growth, which put pressure on the city and its rulers.² The city was an ideal case for the newly inaugurated National Workers’ Housing Fund (Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores, INFONAVIT), which (according to the institution’s data) around the second half of 1975, was creating “on average, one housing complex every four days,” finishing a total of 40,683 housing units nationally that year,³ including the Cucapah complex in Mexicali.

        Thus, it is not surprising that the housing complex in the Mexicali experimental project would directly test an idea of collective housing and would have the support of institutions such as the Public Works Department of the State of Baja California and the Autonomous University of the State of Baja California (UABC). With the premise of creating small communities that would foster relationships, Alexander imagined that the houses would be built by those who would become their owners: calculating that if the five families enrolled in the project dedicated eight hours a day to building their residencies, that they would finish in just sixteen weeks.⁴  In El Sitio—the project’s construction yard —these notions marked a clear principal of collectivism: creating houses was not only a construction process, but also a project of building relations. By working together for a common project, the neighbors would establish relationships in their incipient community and, just as the city of Mexicali was transitioning from the post-revolution collectivism based on the ejido to modern forms of collective housing, the project’s inhabitants would also transition to new ways of communal living. By incorporating students and professors from the state university in the experiment— who would carry out half of the work—the project would bring the city’s main academic institution closer to the recently inaugurated space in the periphery. The participation of architecture students in the building, working hand in hand with the residents, would close the classic gap between the “ivory tower” and ordinary citizens. In that sense, in El Sitio, Alexander was not only experimenting with architectural forms and materials, but also with notions such as community and collective work. Although the project was carried out with support from the state government through the Institute of Social Security at the Service of State Workers of Baja California (Seguridad Social al Servicio de los Trabajadores del Estado de Baja California, ISSSTECALI),⁵ its resolution would not have been possible without work with students from Berkeley and the Architecture Department of UABC, who designed and built the model house.

                El Sitio was a sort of laboratory where different types of inquiries were carried out, one of the most notable of which had to do with the material: they initially attempted to build the house out of blocks made of a substrate mined right there, a material tribute to the desert, as well as an ecological and economical principle that could be seen in other contemporary projects such as Arcosanti, the arcology—a term combining architecture and ecology—project founded in the Arizona desert by the architect Paolo Soleri. This housing project was also a testament to architecture that serves the needs of its inhabitants: from a niche next to the window for school children to do their homework, to a wall that is also a bookcase, to a space to store tools or to come together to eat after hard days of work in construction. The house, in this sense, is not imposed by the architect: it is a space that is discussed and negotiated with the inhabitant. Alexander’s project was cut short by the incompatibilities between the architect’s dream and the reality of a city that leaned toward atomization and individualistic experience: Mexicali was not Berkeley, and the dreams of a new class of urban workers did not necessarily resemble those of an ejidatario, and much less those of a cooperative hippie. Shortly after their houses were finished, the inhabitants and builders of the housing complex led by Alexander found construction problems: the houses were cold in winter, and the elongated rooms did not lend themselves to a typical layout. They gradually renounced the common spaces: they turned their backs on the patios, separated the houses, and atomized themselves around their family units. The house structures, however, are still standing. Curiously, the project’s original building still serves a collective purpose: today it functions as a small community health clinic run by UABC. Perhaps it is not the collectivism that Christopher Alexander imagined, but it expresses and constitutes a lesson in an experimental and timeless way of building.

            El proyecto de Alexander quedó truncado por las incompatibilidades entre el sueño del arquitecto y la realidad de una ciudad que tendía a la atomización y a la experiencia individualista: Mexicali no era Berkeley, y los sueños de una nueva clase de trabajadores urbanos no se asemejaban necesariamente a los de un ejidatario, mucho menos a los de un jipi de cooperativa. Al poco tiempo de haber concluido sus casas, los habitantes y constructores del conjunto de viviendas lideradas por Alexander, hallaron disgustos constructivos: la casa era fría en invierno, y los cuartos alargados no se prestaban a una distribución típica. Paulatinamente, renegaron de los espacios comunes, dieron la espalda a los patios, separaron las casas, y se atomizaron en torno a sus núcleos familiares. Las estructuras de las casas, sin embargo, siguen de pie. Curiosamente, el edificio original del proyecto sigue teniendo un propósito colectivo, hoy funciona como una pequeña clínica comunitaria de salud a cargo de la UABC. Quizá no es la idea de colectividad que imaginó Christopher Alexander, pero expresa y constituye una lección de un modo experimental y atemporal de construir.