The Sedimentary Effect
For the past three years, INSITE has been developing “A Timeless Way of Building,” one of three chapters conceived by curator Andrea Torreblanca as part of The Sedimentary Effect, a long-term project based on natural, social, and spiritual microhistories of the San Diego-Baja California region. Focusing on social architecture through the lens of Christopher Alexander’s 1975 experimental housing complex in Mexicali, this chapter began with the selection of artist Pastizal Zamudio, who lived in Alexander’s project in the 1990s. The chapter evolved to include artist and architect commissions, and conversations at the original site in Mexico and in the US; a dedicated issue of the INSITE Journal featuring seven commissioned texts; and The Mexicali Experimental Project, an exhibition that explores social housing and utopian alternatives from the 1970s, and brings to the fore the process, theories, and debates around the experiment.
Exhibition
The Mexicali Experimental Project
Curators: Andrea Torreblanca in collaboration with Felipe Orensanz
Bread & Salt, San Diego, November 9, 2024–February 15, 2025
The exhibition explores the history and sociopolitical context of the Mexicali Experimental Project, the theories behind it, and its radical transformation over time. It draws on a wide range of resources and collaborations—including archival material, photographs, film, essays, and new commissions with architects and artists.
Publication
INSITE Journal__07: A Timeless Way to Build
Editor-curator: Andrea Torreblanca
Texts by Georgina Cebey, Dorit Fromm, AJ Kim, Nancy Kwak, Alejandro Peimbert and Felipe Orensanz, and Andrea Torreblanca. Interview with Alison B. Hirsch.
This publication presents a hybrid history of social architecture through new commissioned essays that explore the sprawling 1970s industrial border town of Mexicali, the countercultural legacy of the cohousing community, Alexander’s controversial notion of beauty, and the class divisions and segregation affecting Southern California’s unhoused urban dwellers. It includes documentation of commissions with artists and architects as well as public conversations that took place in spring 2023.
Development of the Journal was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Commissions
Pastizal Zamudio, a Mexicali-based artist and former inhabitant of the Mexicali Experiment developed Before the Last Rubble, in the Face of Dawn (2038), 2023, a meditative garden comprised of one hundred handmade stones in the central courtyard of the Mexicali complex.
Artist Cynthia Hooper’s The Mexicali Experiment (2024) is a series of paintings and drawings depicting the current appearance of the houses and builder’s yard of the architectural project.
Mexicali-based architecture studios Veintedoce and Localista conceived a pavilion based on Alexander’s “pattern language” at the original site in Mexicali (2023).
Tijuana-San Diego based architecture collective Cro Studio (Adriana Cuéllar and Marcel Sánchez) realized the design for The Mexicali Experimental Project exhibition.
Designer Alejandro Magallanes created an original typeface for The Mexicali Experimental Project exhibition.
Conversations
El Sitio: A Timeless Way of Building (May 18–20, 2023) was a three-day public conversation at the original site of the Mexicali Experiment dedicated to concepts of vernacular dwelling, social architecture, and spatial justice with Georgina Cebey, CRO Studio, Teddy Cruz, Alejandro D’Acosta, Howard Davis, AJ Kim, Michael Mehaffy, Felipe Orensanz, and Lorenia Urbalejo.
Unmaking the Grid (Bread & Salt, Nov. 9, 2024) was a public conversation dedicated to early architectural projects and practices that challenged social experimentation and thinking in the 1970s, including artist Judith Barry, urbanist Dorit Fromm, architect Thom Mayne, and architectural historian Ginger Nolan.
Housing Ecologies: Conversations on Transborder Living (Bread & Salt, Feb. 15-16, 2025) will be a two-part public conversation on social housing in February and March 2025. Pritzker Prize-winning architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have been invited by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and Renee Y. Chow, Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, has been invited by Marcel Sánchez and Adriana Cuéllar of Cro Studio.
