Everyday Life in Monterrey

Not all of these posts are going to be reflections on architecture related topics or trying to analyze things. That would become boring. This particular post is to share with you what a nearly-typical day in Monterrey has been for me.

I think the first thing I have to mention is the odd relationship the school has with its students, especially the international students. ITESM is very paternalistic (they use that word themselves) in the sense of personal lives. For example, if you live in a dorm room, you can never have a person of the opposite sex in your room. Ever. The best you can do is be in the common room on their floor, and if you wanted to see the room I suppose you would have to take pictures or rig up a system of mirrors that make a visual link from the common room to the dorm room.

So with the rules the way they are, one would think they would be paternalistic in the sense that they will help you with administrative stuff. Incorrect. Signing up for classes was a hassle for every single person. Registering your student visa is completely on your own, unless you hire a legal firm to help you. Printing in a computer lab is the hardest thing I have had to do in several years. But with all these experiences you learn a lot. I don't know what I've learned, but I feel more comfortable being here knowing that I have been able to do things on my own. Do not get the impression that people are not helpful here; rather, organizations are not helpful. Individuals are extremely helpful. You can stop anyone on the street, sidewalk, in a store, wherever and they are more than happy to help you, even if you sound like a moron in Spanish. Organizations like to confuse you, so that they do not run out of work, so that they always seem busy. And I swear they purposefully hire people that do not know any English in the computer labs just so international students do not go to them for technical help. Not that they have to speak English, but I find it suspicious that it is the only department on campus that does not speak any English. I have so much more respect for international students in the USA, since expecting an American to know your home language is laughable.

One really cool thing about campus is that there is wildlife on it. And I'm talking more than squirrels and rabbits. There are 4 deer, many ducks, and 1 peacock.



There are also many stray cats, and occasionally you get to see a security officer chasing around a stray dog (I believe there are about 2 billion stray dogs in Mexico. I am not exaggerating when I say you can see a stray dog every hour if you are looking for one, no matter where you are). The entire campus is surrounded by a fence, therefore the animals stay inside. Also there is security at every gate, so outsiders are not allowed in. It is a snooty private school.

I do not live on campus, I live with a host family. They are very nice and helpful. There is the mother and father, Martha and Julio, and their two sons, Ober and Alan. Alan set up my cheap-ass cell phone since I couldn't decipher the Spanish electronic voice telling me what to do. Martha took me to Tec the first day to show me around, and she showed me the bus system (more on that later). They all live on the first floor. I, along with 5 other guys, all Mexican, live on the second floor. We each have our own room on the second floor, so that is nice. Also, I get fed 3 times a day, except Sundays. And the arrangement is cheaper than the dorms.

The upstairs, outdoor terrace that leads to my room. The window is not my room, unfortunately

Movement. The bus system. My roommate told me that there are 4 million buses in this city. I think he meant to say 4 thousand (mil is Spanish for thousand, thus the possible mix up). Either way, there are very, very, very many buses in this city. And it is the best and cheapest way to get around (in the day). At night cabs are the way to go, and they are cheap. I haven't paid more than $6, and I've gone somewhat far. In Muncie, it costs $8 no matter where you go. Back to buses. Not only do you get places fairly quickly, but the drivers are bred to be extremely aggressive and always take the right of way. Also, stop signs are for decorations, and the stop signs with blinking LED lights that mean actually stop only serve as prettier, more festive decorations. Nearly every bus has a custom horn. Some are trolley sounds, some are sirens, some are whistles, the rest are various noises. All drivers use their horn, custom or not. And all drivers probably go through 5 clutches a month (the buses are all manual transmission). Another person's perspective on the Monterrey buses can be found here. I haven't gotten on the wrong bus yet, but I have missed my stop once and had to walk beside a major highway with no sidewalk to get to a safe place to call my host family to pick me up.

That brings me to the roads. Monterrey is all sprawl, but they have found a pretty good solution to traffic. Each major road through a city (like McGalliard in Muncie or 86th street in Indy) has the usual 3-4 lanes of traffic per side, but it also has a secondary road running beside it for local traffic and buses. There are constant on-and-off exits, so traffic keeps moving.



There are occasionally mild back-ups on the secondary roads due to buses taking both lanes of traffic at a bus stop or the occasional mandatory red-light.

Nightlife. The first two times I went out it was with other international students: some other Americans, a Canadian, a person from France (Frenchian?), and we met up with other countries at the bars. Theses experiences were what I expected. The places were meant for students and were tourist friendly. Although the bartenders like to bring you surprises, like the 2-liter plastic beer bottle I received complete with a bucket of ice. Then my second weekend I experienced a real Mexican club. I had a lot of reading to do and I was expecting to stay in so that I could meet up with people the next day. It's 12:30 am, I'm getting ready for bed, and one of my roommates says to go out with him and his friends. I remind him of the time, and he states that 1:00 am is the normal hour to go out in Mexico. Not wanting to miss out on what sounded like a good learning experience, I put my contacts back in and jumped in the car. The place was huge. More than half of the guys had on cowboy hats. There were hundreds of people. The music was all live: reggaeton (which I don't particularly like), Norteno, other styles I don't yet know the name of. It was a fun experience. I finally talked my roommate into leaving at just before 5:00 am (the place was open until 10:00 am). One new thing for me was that you have to get a ticket from the bartender before you can leave. I think it is to make sure you paid. This took about 5 minutes for me to understand due to the foreign language and loud music.

I've also done a few days of sight seeing. Photos of those can be found on the right hand side of the page. Last weekend I spent in a very small rural town and then in Real de Catorce, an old mining town. Tonight (Thursday) I am leaving on another trip to Guanajuato (10 hours away, hooray bus rides!) and we will be gone until very early Monday morning (which is Constitution Day, no school!). Some posts on those will be upcoming.

Why am I here? This is the real first post.

The actual first post was a response to my first weeks. It is a bit harsh, but the first weeks were stressful. I was on the way to see some caves (my first cave experience) and I saw these pockets of bad housing and it ruined my day. But this is the real start.

WHY AM I IN MEXICO?!?!?!?

Well, I will start with an excerpt from my thesis proposal. I end my "World View as an Architect" section with:

"Critical thinking of architectural education leads to the realization that people in the architectural profession have been taught to ignore many parts of society. Due to lack of a better term, these can be called ignored communities and include the homeless, homeless children, illegal immigrants, legal migrant workers, deportees, women in difficult situations, and even whole nations. The lifestyles of these people are unfamiliar to most architects. The building types and methods, if their rudimentary stacks of materials are even granted the title of building types and methods, are unfamiliar to most architects. The needs of these people are often misinterpreted by most architects. As a result they are simply ignored or forced to accept wrong solutions and the negative results are ignored. It is not that architects are bad people, but currently there is no time in a form- and recognition-based profession to fully address these issues."

I follow this paragraph with my "Statement of Inquiry" which is the heart of the proposal:

"As a student who has had many years of formal architectural education and many months of formal professional architectural experience, what is there to be learned from these ignored communities? And how can an experience in working with people of an ignored community go to influence architectural education?
To clarify a bit more, what I find troubling about current architectural education is that we spend several semesters being taught about theoretical and historical figures and movements in architecture. This is crucial to our education, but we are at a disadvantage when we are not taught the realities of the current world we live in. How can valid and interesting theories be correctly implemented into a world that is not clearly understood? We can continue to discuss for several semesters about whether modernism, Eisenman, Gehry, and new urbanism are good and bad, but should we not also include the rest of the world that has no obvious connections to those topics? If our studios train us to have the ability to make design inferences in the traditional way, can our skill be improved in the non-traditional way? And can others benefit from this process?
I feel that these questions must be included in the education process for the same reasons that historic preservation, environmental sustainability, new urbanism, and others are included: there is a need and a desire to study and work in this area. Many students are not interested in historic preservation and do not agree with the approaches of new urbanism, but they are covered in education. In the same way, the building methods and building needs of ignored communities must also be addressed for the architectural profession to become socially responsible and to make socially responsible contributions.
My concentration for graduate school has been sustainability. In regards to the triple bottom line that sustainability is often taught from, I have noticed that social equity is lacking while economical and ecological factors dominate projects. Working with ignored communities will allow for more of a balance within the triple bottom line and also creates a simple integration into the traditional way this concept is taught in architectural education.
The most apparent way that working with an ignored community can highlight social equity would be to witness first hand the actual inequality that takes place within these communities, or even regions..."

As my fellow students at BSU know, there are 30-something other pages that support these ideas, and if any of you would like to browse or read the rest of my proposal, it can be found here. I suggest checking out the "World View as and Architect," "Literature Review," and "Case Studies" sections.

So this is the gist of it; the sneak peak with the deep voice and bright flashes of light. Stay tuned for more as Jesse describes his brief first visit to the community that the studio project will be focused on where he saw firsthand true slum conditions. But nothing will prepare you for the story of spending the night in rural Mexico, drinking water collected from rain, being forced to communicate broken Spanish as he is left behind by the rest of his companions, and catching a ride in a van on the side of the interstate when the bus fails to show up.

But really, I'll put some experiences and thoughts up very soon. In the meantime I'd love to hear from you all. I'd prefer emails over IM chats as I can choose to read emails at anytime and I usually do not go into detailed talks with IM. My email is jesse.alan.miller@gmail.com So tell me how things are going with you!

Twenty-something naivety ready to take on the world

Before the work begins: my first impressions.

Hello all. This is the first record of my semester in Monterrey. First off is a view of part of the city.



The school I attend is in the lower left corner and I live up near the upper right corner near the bottom of the mountain, Cerro de la Silla (Saddle Hill).

This week the actual introduction to the studio project will take place and a visit to the community will be arranged. On Friday I am taking a trip to the very small community (less than 100 people) of San Felipe, 3 hours south of Monterrey, where I will be working with another community to fulfill my ARCH 526 class. But this is much more than a requirement. This is a huge project that reaches beyond architecture. In San Felipe the climate is changing (less water), the lifestyles are changing (traditional farming is harder and money is coming from relatives in the US), and the building methods and materials are changing. To put it very briefly, several departments of ITESM are working with this community in areas of rainwater harvesting, greenhouses, restoration of native plant life, and mixing traditional building methods with some modern materials; the later of which I will be participating in. The goal of this University involvment is to empower the community with knowledge and allow them to spread this knowledge (for a small price) to other similar communities. This is already happening in regards to rainwater harvesting.

With that introduction I will get right into what thoughts I have had in the past week regarding thesis and architecture in general.

One of the points I make in my proposal is that I want to remain in contact with the work I do this semester--that may mean revisiting something that might actually be built/implemented or keeping in communication with people who may continue the work, or maybe even staying to finish the job. The method is not what I am focused on at the moment, rather the knowledge that I will be paying attention to whatever results in the future. This past week I noticed a public project that did not appear to consider future implications.

On a trip to the Grutas de Garcia (Garcia Caves) north of Monterrey, I traveled through some of the industrial metropolitan areas of Monterrey. I passed large industrial parks; I passed abandoned centers where poultry was once raised; I passed individual factories; and I also passed unusual groups of housing. These groups of housing (there were probably around 10 of them that I saw) each covered an area of about 4-5 square kilometers. These groups appeared as massive megablocks in the middle of the desert landscape. There was a small number of access roads that led to the walled in megablocks. Viewing over the walls led to the site of hundreds, if not thousands of identical living units. They may have varied by size according to street, but from a distance it was a perfect grid of identical houses all connected by hundreds of power lines held together by hundreds of telephone poles.

The World Bank: "Wolfowitz visits Mexico"

This was affordable housing, there was no other explanation. My first thought was disgust at the lack of design effort that went into these megagroups. There did not even appear to be areas of landscape or parks within the city walls. Just dead mirror-imaged streets. The neighborhoods were clean (for the time being) but they did not look happy. I thought "This developer never had any intention of revisiting this spot to see if it was a success. This was just a pure efficiency job." But then I had other thoughts...

I couldn't help but relate these massive blocks to the factories and industrial parks that they were nearly adjacent to. Were these the houses for the workers of these factories? They were pretty far from the city center, but they looked low-cost, so it was possible that people lived here and commuted to the city, just like in the U.S. But I couldn't help relating these blocks to other similarities: the slave barracks of the plantation homes in the South; the relationship of the mine owner to the mine workers; the projects.

Were these homes sponsored by the industry that probably employed a lot of the people? The slave barracks image is extreme, but is it not a similar principle? Do these houses exist because of these factories? What happens when these industries pack up and leave for for another region, such as Asia? If these were sponsored in part by the industries, did they make regulations for the areas? Do they have some sort of control over the private lives of the people that live here? Even if the industries did not have any influence in these housing areas, the fact that they are in walls suggests that there are regulations to these areas. There is the feeling of the gated community of keeping people out, but it is reversed here and feels like it is keeping people in.

On the immediate border of these megablocks were a few stores. Since there was a sizeable distance to other stores I couldn't help but relate this situation to the old Mining Company Store stories. Not that these stores jacked up their prices, but did the people that live here have many other choices with their location? Was a multi-use strategy developed for this area? If so, why hasn't the commercial area phase begun?

The above question really bothered me so I did some research. It turns out that a developer named Homex has been doing a lot of low-income housing in the Monterrey area, as well as the rest of Mexico. The company is making incredible profits making cheap houses for poor people. Their business practice is to build the house as simple and as fast as possible (has that ever been beneficial to the consumer?). Currently 90% of their business and 85% of their profit is from low-income housing (homes with a cost of less than $60,000), but they plan on building more for middle and upper class people. An article (poorly translated) can be found here. Homex has amassed a fortune providing cheap, nearly identical residences for people who do not make a lot of money. Now, with a nice selection of funds and designers (who can justify and design with a good salary) they get to diversify their design portfolio by building for rich people. Even home-owned and founded companies are exploiting the people here.

But there's more. This article reports on a deal between Homex and my favorite place to shop Wal-Mart. The article states that each new Homex development with more than 2,000 units gives Wal-Mart the option to open up a new store to serve the complex. It goes on to say that current developments that grow beyond 5,000 units gives Wal-Mart the option to replace stores that may currently be there, which the article makes it appear are most likely Bodega Aurrerá. A quick look-up of that chain shows that Bodega Aurrerá is actaully owned by Wal-Mart, but just a cheaper version (believe it or not). Therefore, more people = a more expensive cheap-ass store that erradicates any local competition. AKA the Mining Company Store. I find it disturbing that the people who live in these low-income housing developments are mostly likely forced to shop at a store (due to lack of other feasible options) that buys from manufacturers who exploit workers, many of whom may be in Mexico.

Continuing with the observations, these superblocks had WALLS. Why? This just screams housing project. I really do not understand the walls surrounding each individual complex. These seem like prototypes for other areas. Or perhaps this was born from a prototype. Either way the sense of place appears to be missing and a sense of repetition and economic efficiency is abundant.

To sum up a long rant, this idea that was made for poor people really never considered the physical, spacial, visual, and moral feelings that would result. Completion was the only factor. Now I'm not worried that I will make a mistake like this, but it really inspired me to remember that as I go into the introduction of the work part of this thesis ther is the importance of leaving a project in a good way.


Another quick reference to my proposal: there is a framework I mention in my proposal, design as a learned skill, that I have thought about in a small way. To briefly explain design as a learned skill, it has to do with the fact that a design will be influenced by the culture in which the research/design is being done in. We (the students at TEC) have not begun designing for this specific project, but I was shown photographs of some work that has been done in another community by other students. In two weeks of being in Monterrey, I have noticed that 90% (I've only seen a few exceptions to this) of the houses have the same basic construction elements. They have gates or some form of security, they have flat or near flat roofs, and there is some sort of color added to some part of the house. The photographs of the project that worked with a community within Monterrey looked like an architectural student project for a poor community, complete with the inclined corrugated metal roof. It could have been nearly anywhere in the world and fit in, as long as it was in a poor community. I'm sure that this building (a classroom) is very good for the community, but what culture is this building really in? The culture of Monterrey or the culture of global poverty? Perhaps I am being unfairly critical of a project soley on appearance, but somehow my brain made a correlation to this research framework and the photographs of this project.

Just this morning I was briefly introduced to the other project I will be working on, the one within the small rural community of San Felipe. Pedro described that he has been facing a problem with the roof system. He explained that the community must use corrugated metal roofs in order to collect the rainwater, which is all they can use for water as the groundwater has a high level of arsenic as a result of natural processes. The problem with the metal roofs is the temperature problem. To summarize the discussion, I became aware of a reason and an investigation of how to use corrugated metal on this project. It was not used because it was cheap, but because it is a known method of collecting the rainwater the people use to survive. Therefore this method is a result of design as a learned skill. But even though this method was used on some buildings, there is still investigation into other materials and methods.



This project is a very good example to learn from as it continually looks toward other options for each structure. This is completely the opposite of the superblocks that pissed me off so much. Even though San Felipe has less than 100 people in the community and a massed produced "solution" would be incredibly easy, each structure is given equal attention and become unique. Similar to how the evolution of cities has been happening for years. The result is not an constantly mimicked set of drawings that CAD defecated onto roles of paper.

In the case of San Felipe vs. Homex-style-housing, natural evolution easily beats out "intelligent design."