In 1975, architect Christopher Alexander (1936–2022) received an invitation to develop a public housing project in the Mexican border town of Mexicali. Coinciding with the conceptualization of his book, A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, 1977), Alexander tested his theories in the “Mexicali Experimental Project” by inviting people to build their own homes. This publication is the first to explore the context in which this experiment was realized and to question its influence as a social model. It looks at analogous countercultural experiments in California and public housing in Mexico of the time to identify a common ideology through social architecture. It features a unique artist intervention by one of the inhabitants in the complex (now a health clinic) and excerpts from a three-day forum in 2023 at a newly commissioned architectural pavilion. Other essays explore self-made dwellings that emerge from the current social and geopolitical conditions of the border region.

Gina Cebey has a doctorate in art history from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Alfonso Caso Medal 2017); a master’s in historiography from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana; and a bachelor’s in history from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM. Her work focuses on urban and architectural representations in art and audiovisual media. Her book, Arquitectura del fracaso. Sobre rocas, escombros y otras derrotas espaciales (Secretaría de Cultura, Dirección General de Publicaciones, 2017), won the José Vasconcelos National Essay Award.

Dorit Fromm is a design researcher and writer, an architect, and has worked in communications for the design industry. She has researched a variety of community and housing designs, conducted postoccupancy evaluations of multiunit housing, and presented on new forms of housing internationally. While an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, she moved to Mexicali, Mexico to build low-income clustered housing with professor Christopher Alexander. This hands-on experience, and visiting the project after residents had moved in, chronicled in several articles, was an eye-opening introduction to community-creation through housing design. Her book, Collaborative Communities (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991), first described the wide variety of European and American models of collaborative housing. She is the author with Peter Bosselmann of Seven Years Later [Mexicali Revisited], (Places Journal, 1984).

Alison B. Hirsch is a landscape theorist, historian, and designer. Both her design and written work focus on how understanding cultural practices and social histories and memories can (and should) contribute to the design of meaningful places. As director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at University of Southern California (USC), Hirsch has established the Landscape Justice Initiative, which serves as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial, and climate justice at local and systemic scales. Hirsch is working on a book, The Performative Landscape, which emphasizes sociocultural dynamics as catalysts for physical design, challenging common conceptions that participatory or socially oriented design processes must sacrifice the spatial, material, and formal qualities of the landscape architectural project. Her 2014 book, titled City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America, was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation and released by University of Minnesota Press in 2014.

AJ Kim has a doctorate in urban planning, a master’s in ethnic studies, and a bachelor’s in gender and feminist studies from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Kim is an associate professor in the department of city planning and the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. Their research focuses on urban informality as a form of resistance that disrupts the state, as well as on tensions of regulation and policing in immigrant communities at the local (city/county) level.

Nancy Kwak is an associate professor in the history department and the urban studies and planning department at the University of California, San Diego. She is the past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History and is currently a nonresident fellow at Carnegie California. She earned a BA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, her MAT at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, and a PhD in history from Columbia University in 2006.

Felipe Orensanz has a master’s in urbanism from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, where he was awarded the Alfonso Caso Medal in 2010. He studied architecture at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (Mexicali). Orensanz works jointly with architect Rodrigo Durán in research, editorial, teaching, and curatorial projects dedicated to architecture. Their most recent book is Ciudad Independencia [Independence City] (Arquine, 2002) and their upcoming book is dedicated to El Sitio, the experimental housing project built by architect Christopher Alexander in 1975–76, in Mexicali.

Alejandro Peimbert has a doctorate in sociocultural studies and architecture from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and a master’s in architecture from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has been a professor of design, theory, and history at the faculty of architecture and design of University of Baja California (UABC) since 2002. His research projects seek to blur the boundaries between architecture, public space, landscape, and culture. His project, Jardín Misión San Adrián, in Mexicali was the winner in the category of built work at the IV Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture (2019). He is the author of the book Paisaje intersticial: vacíos y ruinas en el arte, la arquitectura y la ciudad [Interstitial Landscape: Voids and Ruins in Art, Architecture, and the City] (UABC, 2016).

Andrea Torreblanca is a Mexican curator and writer interested in the intersections of art, architecture, performance, and social history. Torreblanca holds a master’s in curatorial studies from CCS, Bard College, New York. She is currently the director of curatorial projects at INSITE and the founder and editor of the INSITE Journal. Torreblanca has held various curatorial positions in Mexican institutions, including associate curator at the Museo Tamayo, coordinator at the Sala de Arte Siqueiros, and deputy director of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection. Her exhibitions relating to architecture include Speech Acts (2021), a theatrical script based on a dance scenario by the architects PRODUCTORA—inspired by postwar playgrounds; Notes for a Possible Fiction (2019), on the relationship between architect Adolf Loos and dancer Josephine Baker; The Theater of the World (2014), which examined contemporary Potemkin architecture; and Cyclorama (2013), based on the first diorama tower building.

Founded in 1983 as an artist-run alternative space in San Diego, Installation Gallery’s sole focus since 1992 has been INSITE, an initiative committed to facilitating and producing artworks in the public sphere through multi-year collaborations among artists, curators, architects, urban planners, cultural agents, institutions, and communities. INSITE has realized six editions over three decades, each developed through a distinct curatorial framework privileging the long-term engagement of artists conceiving new research-based works for specific sites and political-social contexts. A fundamental tenet of INSITE is to provide artists with ample resources to conceive works that engage public consciousness and instigate critical public discourse.