TIJUANA // QUICK, LOOSE, DIRTY

An economy that easily slides from corporate to blackmarket, it sustains clinics for cosmetic surgery and dentistry (and other "experimental" procedures), inexpensive retail pharmaceuticals, and hundreds of large multi-national assembly plants (among other things, producing more TVs than anywhere else in the world). Its "experiments" in collective life include a mimicry of San Diego developer (often gated) housing communities as well as informal squatter settlements that have evolved over decades. As such, Tijuana provides a plastic context for the research and extrapolation of multiple posturban formats in dense proximity, where planned and accidental, figural and residual, exchange and recombine with abandon. What are the precise architectural and urban lessons that can be projected from this context? >>

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