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[WELCOME TO THE USA]: Architecture and Human Rights at the Border
A Discussion with Teddy Cruz and Thomas Keenan

Thursday, July 30, 2009
6:30-8:30pm

at Van Alen Institute

Van Alen Institute, in collaboration with the Human Rights Project at Bard College, presents a discussion between Teddy Cruz and Thomas Keenan on architecture, human rights, and spatial conditions at the U.S. border.

Every year sixty million people carrying untold amounts of goods and services cross the international border between the United States and Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint—the most heavily trafficked border crossing in the world. Recently the U.S. government through the Department of Homeland Security has poured billions of dollars into this region in order to reinforce its surveillance infrastructure. At the same time, the “off-the-radar” flow of human and economic capital between north and south has proven irrepressible, exacerbating political tensions and the disparities of status existing between the two neighbors. At no other urban juncture in the world is it possible to find in such close proximity so volatile a juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, social and cultural similarity and difference, and formal and informal types of urbanism. San Diego-based Teddy Cruz has been among the most outspoken architects and activists to focus attention on this crisis situation. His conversation with cultural theorist and human-rights scholar Thomas Keenan takes place against the backdrop of the current exhibition “The Aesthetics of Crossing” by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects and Alan Michelson / Kadambari Baxi and Irene Cheng, on view at Van Alen Institute from July 1-31, 2009.

This event is free and open to the public; please RSVP to rsvp@vanalen.org by 12:00pm on Thursday, July 30.

BIOS
Thomas Keenan teaches human rights, media, and literature at Bard College. He has written Fables of Responsibility (Stanford University Press, 1997), edited New Media, Old Media (with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Routledge, 2005), and is completing a book on war, crisis, and media.

Teddy Cruz’s work dwells at the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice (Estudio Teddy Cruz) and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He received the 2004-5 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize and is currently an Associate Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at University of California, San Diego.