Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina pushed a 30-foot-high surge of water through East Biloxi, Mississippi, tall weeds grow along streets once lined with houses. Biloxi’s casinos have been reconstructed, larger than their former selves.
Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' David Sokol: In this October’s “The Architect’s Hand” column, RECORD published two of your works. Border Postcard was realized in 2000. This mosaic of photographic fragments collected between Tijuana and San Diego represents how the urban infrastructure of San Diego is recycled into the fabric of Tijuana. A more recent artwork installed at this year’s Venice Biennale, Radicalizing the Local: 60 Miles of Trans-Border Urban Conflict, is a photographic cross-section of the border between these two cities highlighting
Guest editor of RECORD's October 2008 issue, David Sokol, speaks with San Diego architect Teddy Cruz about form, politics, and 'repositioning practice.' DS: How does inserting architecture at these margins manifest itself architecturally, or do you become a politician? TC: That fear of politics and social engineering has generated debate. I think ultimately that’s counter-productive. I feel that the only terrain that can be fertile for experimental architecture needs to be a terrain that is composed of the right sociopolitical and economic conditions. Image courtesy Estudio Teddy Cruz Teddy Cruz with Ana Aleman, Border Postcard: The Tijuana Workshop, 2000. I
Architects have embraced social responsibility longer than the media has acknowledged. In fact, an optimistic view of design’s ability to improve the world has defined great movements in the profession’s history. But only recently has activity in this field and attention from the press reached critical mass. This issue of record considers the flourishing of design with conscience—from isolated instances in the academy to an increasing trend in practice. Image courtesy Urban-Think Tank Urban-Think Tank is working on two vertical gyms for Venezuela’s barrios. Read a profile of the firm in our Humanitarian Design section. Why the explosion? “What may
Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Do-good architecture is the noble aspiration to better the shelter of mankind. Today it gets a louder hearing than usual, because the housing situation is a shambles. By 2040, a third of mankind will live in slums. Not just the poor; a third of everybody. That’s the motivating fear—the growing dread that the political and economic systems we’ve built do us active harm. There was the major trauma of Katrina, of course. Historic New Orleans collapsed, becoming a sudden sister city to the
Bruce Sterling considers the one small voice of socially responsible architecture — and the nefariousness overwhelming it. Finally, we arrive at some legal, conventional, low-income housing. This is the first of these vast and growing structural complexes not directly intended to hamper or harm people, and the first that directly involves architects and architectural ethics. But do-good architecture does not merely respond to material poverty. Instead, it tangos with the colossal dysfunctionalities outside any blueprints. Today’s durable disorder is the playground of city-busting militias, gangsters, armed fanatics, and the blooming demimondes of narcotics, offshore pollution, and human trafficking. A vast,
Joe Addo looks beyond architecture for his native Ghana. Joe Addo Twenty years after leaving his native Ghana to attend the Architectural Association in London and then seek employment abroad, Joe Osae-Addo found himself contemplating a return to his homeland during a visit in 2000. The West African nation had just elected a new president, and Addo sensed a “democratic fervor” that had not existed before. “There was an atmosphere of optimism and euphoria, and I wanted to be part of it,” he says. In Los Angeles he had started a practice in the early 1990s focusing on small civic
Who was it who said, “God is in the details”? The Pavlovian response is Mies van der Rohe, who was purported to have said it during a 1959 interview with theNew York Herald Tribune.