Be sure to go to the page and look at the slide show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/arts/design/19hous.html?8dpc
The New York Times
February 19, 2008
Architecture
Learning From Tijuana: Hudson, N.Y., Considers Different Housing Model
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
If you doubt that the derelict shantytowns of Tijuana could work as a
template for redevelopment in a quaint, upscale town in the Hudson
River Valley, you're probably underestimating Teddy Cruz.
Mr. Cruz, an architect and professor at the University of California,
San Diego, has spent the better part of a decade strolling through
Mexico's bustling border towns in search of inspiration. Where others
saw poverty and decay, he saw the seeds of a vibrant social and
architectural model, one that could be harnessed to invigorate
numbingly uniform suburban communities just across the border.
"Developers in Tijuana would build entire neighborhoods of generic
400-square-foot houses miniature versions of suburban America," Mr.
Cruz said in an interview. "What I noticed is how quickly these
developments were retrofitted by the tenants." Informal businesses
like mechanics' shops and taco stands would quickly sprout up on the
front lawns and between the houses, transforming them into highly
layered spaces.
Mr. Cruz built a reputation by applying those lessons to the design of
residential developments for Latino immigrants in suburban San Diego,
enveloping simple housing units in a matrix of communal spaces.
About a year and a half ago, Mr. Cruz received an unexpected call from
David Deutsch, an artist who runs a nonprofit foundation that sponsors
arts programs in Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Deutsch was worried about the
effects of gentrification on the town's poorest residents, many of
whom live in decaying neighborhoods just out of view of the
transplanted New Yorkers and weekend antique shoppers ambling down its
main strip.
Together Mr. Cruz and Mr. Deutsch set in motion an unconventional
redevelopment plan aimed at reintegrating the poor and the
dispossessed into Hudson's everyday life. (The plan, which is being
supported by the city's mayor, Richard Scalera, is scheduled to go
before the city council in the next few weeks.)
They began by holding a series of workshops with Bangladeshi and
Hispanic immigrants and African-American and elderly residents to
develop a project that grew to include communal gardens, playgrounds,
an outdoor amphitheater, a co-op grocery and "incubator spaces" that
could be used for arts or job-training programs.
To insert the project as gently as possible into the city's existing
fabric, Mr. Cruz broke it into six distinct developments. Then he
zeroed in on a series of empty municipal lots "leftover urban
fragments," he calls them that serve as an informal dividing line
between the decrepit working-class neighborhood along State Street and
the pricey coffee and antiques shops that run parallel along Warren
Street, just to the west.
His notion was to use the developments to create a series of subtle
but unexpected connections between east and west, poor and privileged.
In one example Mr. Cruz proposed a narrow park that would cut through
a series of city blocks and connect Warren and State Streets. Along
the park's eastern edge, he would plant a mixed-use housing complex
with apartments stacked like building blocks around a series of
intimate public zones.
At the center of the complex he designed a raised amphitheater where
tenants could sit and look out at the park below. Smaller, more
private terraces overlook the amphitheater from the surrounding
apartments. Each of the units has its own private entrance on the street.
Mr. Cruz also proposed to preserve a community garden several blocks
to the north by surrounding it on three sides with housing and public
amenities. A long covered loggia frames one side of the garden, with a
greenhouse perched on top. The loggia will act as a communal porch
where people can mingle, eat lunch, play chess. A row of small
three-story houses frames the opposite side, punctuated by narrow
alleyways that will allow people to filter into the site.
There are also more direct echoes of Mr. Cruz's Tijuana research. In
one development a day care and elderly center topped by stacked
apartments would be housed in a series of garagelike spaces along a
small public playground. The apartments are reminiscent of the stucco
bungalows in Tijuana that are sometimes raised on steel braces to make
room for new shops underneath.
Some of the apartments extend over the park like fingers, suggesting
makeshift shelters. Small, shared terraces connect the affordable
units to instill a sense of community. Higher up a series of
market-rate apartments have private terraces, as if to assert their
independence.
For iconoclasts Mr. Cruz's design may not push enough buttons in
formal architectural terms. But his great achievement here has less to
do with aesthetic experimentation than with creating a bold antidote
to the depressing model of ersatz small-town America embraced by so
many suburban developers in recent years. In its place he proposes a
complex interweaving of rich and poor, old and new, public and
private, a fabric in which each strand proclaims a distinct identity.
As the flow of new immigrants into America's suburbs makes them ripe
for architectural experimentation, his insights will become only more
relevant.
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