This presentation is about my interest in Fences. Fences that are inoffensive as the ones found in every home and fences that change the political relationships between countries.

I am also interested in fences that affect social structures. This was Friendship Park; a crucial meeting point for families that traveled miles, from the North and South, to meet each other and share a whole day together speaking across the fence.

I am also interested in the desires that intend to contest these fences. The fence as a stage for activism and performance.

I am interested in their porosity, when the fence is more than a line, when it becomes a space. Southbound in the US/Mex border part of my reality – everyday fences to come in and go out

In the city, I see the space of flows delimited by the fence

I am interested in their value as mechanism for security

I am also interested on how they contain memory and our personal past.

I am interested in them as space of contemplation and poetics. Luis Barragan’s screen in the Capuchinas convent in Mexico City.

I am interested in the potential they have to imagine new political and institutional spaces through architecture.

Architecture, through the screen and the fence, operates as cultural ornament at an urban scale.

All these readings became the inspiration for three projects I designed in the last 3 years. The first one at the MCASD we experimented with the idea of porosity and the spatial possibilities of the fence.

Laser cut plywood panels with ornamentation at different scales made the object attain levels and intensities of porosity and visual engagement.

At the Santa Monica Museum of Art we experimented with the fence and its possiblity in delimitng spaces, zones and thresholds.

At the Children’s Museum we experimented with folding the fence into a spatial structure.

In all three projects I was interested in taking the political aspect of the fence towards the phenomenological (into a poetics of light).

I was also interested in the experience from within. The effects of looking out from them.

And finally, I am interested in fences because I believe that their realities, truths, myths and even their beauty can inspire both our worlds to coexist.

Blog de los alumnos de Washington University – Tijuanologies.

Curso de diseño urbano que estoy impartiendo con John Hoal.

Entrega Final Julio 18, 2009

Blog of Washington Univeristy students – Studio I am teaching with John Hoal

Final Presentation July 18, 2009

A Literary Legend Fights for a Library

Ethan Pines for The New York Times

NYTimes Story

click here
El escritor Ray Bradbury a sus 90 años comenta sobre su carrera, como odia el internet, su preferencia de las bibliotecas por la universidades y ni más ni menos de Bo Derek!
Le doy toda la razón a Bradbury, si invirtiéramos en bibliotecas en vez de universidades patitos que aparecen por done quiera, tendríamos una sociedad más informada, creativa y libre. Se tiene que iniciar la idea de hacer un sistema de bibliotecas en vez de una sola centralizada, la época de la biblioteca como representación del conocimiento se acabo. El banco dejo de ser este espacio grandioso hace mucho tiempo, el cajero automático es su avatar…ocupamos el atm de los libros

I REALIZED THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A STUPID QUESTION!

Esta semana me la pase en el DF, monstrou urbano. Aqui unas imagenes de las experiencias mas importantes…para mi!

CU y su traza urbana modernista
Convento de las Capuchinas de Luis Barragan
la iglesia de felix candela- no hay comparacion!

My late night insomniac generic thoughts

Notes on the future of the region

It is immediately apparent that this structure is composed of a formless heap of fragments colliding one against the other. The whole area between the Tiber, the Campidoglio, the Quirinale, and the Pincio is represented according to a method of arbitrary association (even though Piranesi accepts the suggestions of the Forma urbis), whose principles of organization exclude any organic unity.

Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth – Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), p. 34.

Tijuana began as a utopian ideal, its origin as a city rooted in concepts of modernism from the late 19^th century. Its past is modern – similar to NY, LA, Las Vegas or any other 20th century city. Downtown Tijuana is quasi modern and pseudo utopian. A city that simulated universal ideals that in the present remained obscure by the distopian path of postmodernism. Yet being modern (or pesudo modern) is not a fault, but an attribute that in the mist of globalization could generate a new “mood” for the city. As some say, maybe modernity is unfinished business. For Rem Koolhaas the generic is a consequence of the failure of modernism – junk space. Yet, a different kind of generic could appear –the search for an ethics in plurality and the ideal of architecture can become a premise for the construction of a correlative urban form. A Piranesian modernism is what Tijuana is all about.

Shaken But Not Stirred: Fifteen San Diego/Tijuana Architectural Designers

1. Shaken (with the news of not being invited) But Not Stirred (in anger or jealousy)

2. Shaken (in a small gallery as a team) But Not Stirred (to be homogeneous mix)

3. Shaken (as mismatch of philosophies) But Not Stirred (to be diluted critically)

4. Shaken (into shape) But Not Stirred (into form)

5. Shaken (in a specific context) But Not Stirred (producing unique results)

6. Shaken (into an indiscriminate encounter) But Not Stirred (into a pregnant association)

7. Shaken (into an expeditious assemblage) But Not Stirred (to shelve 26 years to do it again)

8. Shaken (into transformation) But Not Stirred (into revolution)

9. Shaken (by the informal) But Not Stirred (by surrogate romanticism)

10. Shaken (into responsive efficiency) But Not Stirred (into material fetishes)

architects/arquitectos

Emily FIerer , Miki Iwasaki, Megan Willis, Jose Parral+Tasi Paulson, Andrea Dietz, Hector Perez, Peter Perisic, Adriana Cuellar+Marcel Sanchez, Philipp Bosshart, Christopher Puzio, Cameron Crockett, generica+Rene Peralta+Monica Fragoso

New Cecut director provokes protests – and a debate

Posted using ShareThis

Please Bore me to death!

“But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one; the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn’t interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quite necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.

But what if one refuses to allow one self to be chased away? Then boredom becomes only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s own existence. If one never bored, one would presumably not really be present at all and would thus be merely on more object of boredom, as was a claim at the outset.. One would light up on the rooftops or spool by a filmstrip. But if indeed one is present, one would have no choice but to be bored by the ubiquitous abstract racket that does not allow one to exist, and at the same time, to find oneself boring for exsiting in it.”

Siegfried Kracauer, Boredom (1924)