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."