Tijuana the Provocative Type
This studio project was conceived with the idea of having students work on a project related to border issues in light of the World Design Capital for 2024 in San Diego and Tijuana. Adjacent to the international border, the selected site was 18 urban Tijuana blocks. The architectural goal was to experiment with housing typologies in a sensitive urben environment where typological inventions or programmatic mutations would drive the student projects to be provocative in adddressing the urban context in which they intervened.
STUDIO: Third-Year Undergraduate Architecture
SCHOOL: NewSchool of Architecture and Design
YEAR: 2024
INSTRUCTORS: Jesus F. Limon
Jose F. Garcia
John McMahon
Phase 1: Case Study
Case studies of existing buildings were selected to break down into diagrams that dealt with urban housing typologies.
REFERENCE:
Precedents in Architecture: Analytic Diagrams, Formative Ideas, and Parties
Phase 2: Project Introduction
Starting from the border and nesting between Av. 5 de Mayo and Av. Miguel F. Martinez, eighteen Tijuana Centro blocks were assigned individually or in student pairs.
A contextual mass model of each block is made for testing the early proposals of the project, as well as the evolution to the final project.
An analysis of the assigned blocks included both programmatic and typological breakdowns of the existing context.
Then, student interventions take place to propose housing typologies and context provocations.
Phase 3: Ambition and Execution
Each student prepares a concept diagram that serves as a project map to overlap issues of context, program, form, and details on their plans of commitment to their provocations.