This exhibition will serve as a public platform to discuss the crisis of affordable housing, and the de-funding of public infrastructure in the contemporary city. It will elaborate on the realization that no advances in socially and environmentally sustainable building design can occur without reorganizing the existing political structures, economic resources, and social capita that can produce alternative systems for habitation.

Organized around a series of conceptual and geographic scales, the exhibition takes the viewer from the concept of an increasing global border (coined by Teddy Cruz as the “political equator”) to the micro-scale of the neighbourhood on the border of San Diego and Tijuana that has served as a laboratory for Estudio Teddy Cruz in the last few years. The exhibition shows that it is in peripheral areas such as these that conditions of social emergency are transforming our way of thinking about urban matters.

The projects on view include conceptual works, presented through videos, photos, drawings, models, and cartographies such as “Mapping Non Conformity,” which questions conventions of land use representations and its exclusion of social interactions to measure density, and “McMansion Retrofitted,” which proposes to alter an existing 8000 square foot single-family suburban house into a mixed-use multi-family dwelling.

This is the PARC Foundation’s first architectural exhibition in their Bleecker Street space.