Integral Intelligences: Architect Teddy Cruz Practises Personal Sustainability

Personal Practise of Integral City Intelligences

Currently, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego, Teddy is known for his architecture of social responsibility [I8], derived from his experience in the water shed of the Tijuana River, which flows north out of the cultural chaos of Mexico into the socially structured zones of San Diego.

Teddy’s curiosity and deep respect for the natural and human ecologies enliven both his commentary and his visuals of the ecosphere [I1], which has called him to notice emergent life in the interstitial zones influenced by the river wetlands, the tidal flats, the estuary flows, the international border and the human migrations. Originally from Guatemala, he has a genuine empathy with the newcomer, with ecological invasions, political clashes and ambiguous spaces. He sees the degradation of the environment reflected in social and political degradation and vice versa.

Teddy gives voice to the value of emergent complexity [I2] – not with aesthetic judgment at the rough and ready changes that continually surprise, but with delight in the co-existence of contradictory conditions like the San Diego gated community whose existence depends on immigrant housekeepers, child minders and landscape workers, crossing the border from Mexico.

Cruz sees new life and new possibilities because local conditions on both sides of the border are being radicalized [I2]. On the north side of the international divide people are the invading species, pixilating the carefully zoned American landscape with their lively Latin routines of daily work, travel, art and home life. On the south side of the same crossing, Cruz admires the ingenuity of repurposing building materials like garage doors imported from San Diego suburb renovations, that become the primary exterior cladding for buildings made entirely of garage doors!! What is the role of architect in such a fluid time and space?? [I9] It is the designer who sees the possibilities for modular steel frames that enable the shapeshifting of devalued, atypical land spaces, and the evolution of building clusters imagined as an unfolding series of purposes, with plural dimensions and a variety of co-designing users.

Teddy Cruz is a master of complex adaptive design – he negotiates ambiguity at multiple scales [I3]. He sees the potential for nests of whole systems to serve both individual and collective needs – whether that be a tradesman, his family, his shop, a neighbor’s retail store or the meeting space for the street [I6, I7]. Consider: a building with ground floor living rooms, transmuting into a 2nd floor home, with a working garage underneath it, and a father-in-law flat behind, bordered by living quarters for a brother’s new family and artisan shop.

Cities who talk about density, too often offer it as a clinically static benchmark of urban life. Teddy, on the other hand, considers density merely a resulting condition of negotiating shared intention, social responsibility and economic opportunities. [I4, I11] Density for him becomes flexible and fluid. For Teddy, regulation ought not to lock in density as a permanent condition but keep the social condition responsive and adaptive, so that density is a healthy and intelligent result of active participation in urban life. [I2, I4]

Listening to and watching Teddy Cruz’s story of intelligent design, is an entertaining, breathtaking, provoking and challenging experience. Don’t expect to sit still because he invites you to examine your assumptions. [I9] How can you use the natural conflicts that come up about land use to enable creativity to flourish? Why shouldn’t the house/workplace dweller be an active participant in street/city design? What politics of zoning assure hardening of the legislative arteries? When will we embrace the fact that all resources have a natural flow and lifecycle – whether they be human resources or natural resources or recycled window frames? [I4]

Teddy says, “My education came out of phenomenology in the ’80s [I5], and it stressed that we all engage in the reality of the world through our perceptions [I6] and interpretations [I5, I8} of that reality. At the same time I feel the poetics in architecture remain too isolated from the politics of the construction of the city. [I5, I8] And somehow many of these images should be bridges to reconnect the poetic and the political.” (Sokol, October 2008)

Teddy’s urbanism has been described as “bricollage”.  Philosopher Andy Clark proposes that “our minds are a kludge (or bricollage) of different kinds of intelligence … some … arise out of decentralized and parallel processes; others from centralized and sequential ones.” (De Landa, 1995). Teddy seems to be a natural meshworker – one who facilitates self-organizing hierarchies and hierarchies of self-organization  (Hamilton, 2008). [I10] He crosses boundaries, enabling the co-existence of differentiated wholes (or holons), so that healthy integration and complex emergence can happen.[I10] He is not merely a networker, or replicator but a catalyst to self-organizing design. He walks into the center of conflicts like zoning bylaws and lending requirements and discovers the new intelligences that come from transcending and including old structures so that new processes and patterns can happen. He demonstrates the mutually beneficial values of pixilated land use zoning, economic micro-loans, and an aesthetic fabric that emerges from peoples’ involvement in stitching together the co-design of their urban life. Teddy dances on the margins where the exchanges between the old traditional ways, the modern strategies and the socially responsible approaches recombine into living systems energized by hope, action, engaged culture and growing social capacity.[I12]

Conclusion

In the “century of the city” (Pierce et al., 2008), architect Teddy Cruz makes urban sustainability personal, by living all twelve of the Integral City intelligences in a totally evolutionary way. [I12]. He exemplifies the highest leverage point for changing a system, identified by systems pioneer, Donella Meadows (Meadows, 2008). He not only creates the conditions for changing mindsets, he transcends old paradigms through his personal commitment to bridging the poetic and the political. In doing so he seems to live by the Integral City Master Rule: Take care of yourself, Take Care of Each Other, Take Care of this Place (Appendix A).  Teddy Cruz showed us how to do this at Elevate 09, by sharing his passion, his calling and his challenge for all to co-create personal sustainability design practice.

References:

De Landa, M. (1995). Homes: Meshwork or Hierarchy? http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.5956.html  Special: Home issue. Retrieved Dec. 4, 2004

Hamilton, M. (2008). Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive. Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers.

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in Systems. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Pierce, N., Johnson, C., & Peters, F. (2008). Century of the City. New York: The Rockefeller Foundation.

Sokol, D. (October 2008). Repositioning Practice: Teddy Cruz (Publication. Retrieved March 18, 2009, from Architectural Record: http://archrecord.construction.com/features/humanitarianDesign/0810cruz-1.asp

Appendix A

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Integral City Evolutionary Intelligences ©2009

Intelligences