Archinect - News

San Diego-Tijuana selected as the World Design Capital for 2024

2023-02-21T17:41:00-05:00

The World Design Organization (WDO) has announced a cross-border combination of San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico as the official World Design Capital for 2024.

The designation was bestowed “as a result of their commitment to human-centered design and legacy of cross-border collaboration to transform the region’s natural and built environments,” according to the WDO. Their selection marks the first time in history that a binational urban region will share the honor that was first established in 2008.

Both cities boast their own stock of significant architecture (The Salk Institute and Geisel Library in San Diego; various monuments and the CECUT Cultural Center in Tijuana) and will leverage the title in order to pursue a slate of dispositive investigations into issues impacting the built environment in both communities under the banner HOME2024.

“In today’s socio-e...

Trans-Border Patrolling; A conversation about Tijuana with René Peralta and Orhan Ayyüce

2017-06-29T18:39:00-04:00

This week René Peralta and Orhan Ayyüce joins us to discuss Tijuana and the unique border condition the Mexican city shares with San Diego.

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Proposal for research study to regenerate the Tijuana River Canal into power producing and water remediation infrastructure for the city of Tijuana, Mexico.

Tijuana Solar River, by René Peralta.

Design for Tijuana Cathedral nixed for 'not looking like a cathedral'

2017-06-02T17:44:00-04:00

The architect Eugenio Velazquez has had a tough couple years. Back in 2012, he was jailed for smuggling cocaine from Mexico into the United States. Now, his design for a new cathedral in Tijuana has been shut down—11 years after work first started.

The Archbishop of Tijuana, Francisco Moreno Barrón, cancelled the project because he felt that Velazquez’s contemporary design didn’t look like a cathedral. So now he’s launched a competition for a new, assumedly more traditional, design. It’s open only to Mexican architects, although foreigners are allowed to team up with Mexican ones.

“In its eagerness to be modern, the project does not resemble a Catholic temple, much less a cathedral,” Archbishop Barrón wrote in a statement.

The whole project has a rather dark side to it. While the site was obtained back in the late ‘70s, construction was delayed due to the 1993 assassination of the previous archbishop of Tijuana, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who was mistaken for a drug lord. And Velazquez...

A river of solar power: a scheme for the Tijuana river

2016-03-23T18:30:00-04:00

In Tijuana, another architect is devising a plan to turn the Tijuana River channel into a solar farm that could provide power to as many as 30,000 homes. Rene Peralta, co-founder of the Tijuana firm Generica and director of an architecture master's program at San Diego's Woodbury University, thinks that his city can transform this unwieldy piece of infrastructure into a renewable energy plant and water-cleaning station.

February 2016 was the hottest month in several thousand years, so it seems like a good idea to start transforming erstwhile urban heat islands into power-generating rivers. Below, Generica's rendering of the proposed redesigned Tijuana river channel:

For more on projects that turn seemingly intractable swaths of infrastructure into gorgeous urban amenities:

There's now a pedestrian bridge on the U.S.-Mexico border that let's you fly into Tijuana, and walk out into San Diego

2015-12-11T13:35:00-05:00

A purple pedestrian bridge between two terminals that link Tijuana International Airport and San Diego over the U.S.-Mexico border opened to passengers Wednesday morning. The Cross Border Xpress is the first project to join a site in the U.S. with a foreign airport terminal. [...] The $120-million private venture aims to serve about 2.4 million fliers each year who usually would have to queue up in busy border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa on the California side.

Building a new architecture school in, and for, Tijuana: "I wanted to be right in the middle of things."

2015-11-02T12:30:00-05:00

"We want students to be able to build — to go to a building or a plaza and be able to analyze what works and what doesn't. And we want them to work within the social context, in this case, of Tijuana." "Tijuana is our laboratory," says Enrique González Silva, the school's founding academic director. "The idea of the program is that the students understand the reality of being an architect here." [...] "The theory is very important. But we want students to be able to design and build."

More on Tijuana's developing architectures:

Minimalist Homes Rise in Tijuana as Violence Subsides

2014-06-06T15:08:00-04:00

Ask almost any of the local architects in this Mexican border town and they will tell you Tijuana has become a hotbed of building activity. The growing demand for designer homes, they say, is being driven primarily by Tijuana natives returning to the city... Most of the developments in Tijuana are for upper-middle-class families ... but the spare designs and basic building materials, especially concrete, used by Mr. Medina and others make it possible for more residents to have designed homes.

Launch event tonight! "Shaping the City" refreshes case studies of contemporary urbanism

2013-11-01T18:52:00-04:00

Drop by Hollywood’s finest art and architecture bookstore, Hennessey + Ingalls, tonight for a special event launching Shaping the City, a newly revised edition of contemporary urbanism case studies. The event will also feature a conversation with University of Toronto’s Director of Urban Design, and Shaping the City’s editor, Rodolphe el-Khoury, along with Qingyun Ma, Dean of USC School of Architecture. The conversation will also include Shaping the City contributors Teddy Cruz, Victor J. Jones, and Paulette Singley.

Archinect picked the brains of el-Khoury and Singley before the launch, here’s some tidbits:

Archinect: What was your contribution to Shaping the City?

Rodolphe el-Khoury: [Co-author Edward Robbins and I] conceived Shaping the City as a potential textbook that would sample aspects of the city without imposing an overarching conceptual framework on the complex and varied manifestations of urban forms and phenomena.

Paulette Singley: "Los Angeles: Between Cognit...

El futuro necesita imaginarse; Tijuana, Edgelands and Network culture

2012-05-08T22:28:00-04:00

As we look at the border in an age of network culture ascendant, we need to do so with the special goggles of a Deleuzian Israeli commando, and see the presence of the networks that are the real nervous system of the cities on both sides, networks that pay little attention to the border...As we look at the robot eyes of the surveillance cameras, we need to pay more attention to how networks let the people conduct surveillance on power.

Chris N Brown analyzes the threads between; a) a series of recent projects by Pepe Rojo, (of the media studies faculty of the Autonomous University of Baja California) and 150 of his students in creating the imaginary Tijuana Liberation Front (FLT), dedicated to articulating-hacking the paramilitary zone of the border-future interventions, b) the virtual border/wall work of HSARPA (the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency), c) the work of IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute (in applying the poststructuralist theories of Deleuze & Guattari to a strategy of urban “infestation”) and d) contemporary network culture. In the process illuminating how Tijuana might be a “City of the Future”.

Rethinking the U.S./Mexico Border Fence

2011-09-12T12:15:58-04:00

It would be easy for me to raise a picket sign and as an architect say, ‘Down with this wall!’

"Border Wall as Infrastructure" a proposal by Ron Rael and a partner, Virginia San Fratello, was a finalist in the 2010 Working Public Architecture 2.0 Competition organized by UCLA's cityLAB. Mr. Rael is first to admit that his plan isn't likely to be implemented anytime soon. Until then, though, we can dream of the day when a border wall with personality shows up as a hot destination in the travel and leisure sections of the newspapers.