The Mexicali, Mexico Experimental Housing Project:
A contemplative, human-scale approach to housing on the Border
In the 1970s, the Mexican state worked with an avant-garde architect to build unique homes for workers in Mexicali. Could this forgotten experiment hold answers for Mexico’s housing crisis today?
By Caroline Tracey (Border Chronicle)
HAVANA TIMES – West of Mexicali’s city center, on an ordinary street of working-class homes, look closely and you’ll notice something different on the horizon. Instead of the flat laminate roofs common across the low-slung desert city, a cluster of homes is topped by rounded roofs, each one resembling an inverted half-pipe.
These homes harken to a forgotten moment of the architectural avant-garde—the product of an innovative collaboration between the Mexican state and one of the 20th century’s most prominent architectural theorists. For decades, as the neighborhood block became crowded with additions like carport shades, wrought-iron fences, and air-conditioning units, the unique roofs faded into the landscape. Now this moment of architectural innovation is getting its due in an exhibition sponsored by the contemporary-art organization INSITE and the Autonomous University of Baja California.
The story begins with Mexico’s postwar urban housing crisis. The crisis took shape in Mexicali—founded in the early 1900s as an agricultural town—as U.S. corporations built factories and assembly plants at the border. Workers and their families moved in, and from 1940 to 1980, Mexicali’s population multiplied twentyfold, from 18,000 to more than 300,000.
As housing demands grew across the country, Mexico’s government agencies built housing complexes—known as conjuntos urbanos, unidades habitacionales, or multifamiliares—for working families. In 1972, the government created an agency, INFONAVIT (National Housing Fund Institute), to oversee the construction of these complexes nationwide.
The designs were inspired by French architect Le Corbusier, whose vision of the modern city consisted of high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by green space. They resembled Soviet khrushchyevkas and French banlieues. “Monumental in scale and modernist in style, the multifamiliar provided a national aesthetic for social welfare in midcentury Mexico,” writes historian David Yee in the book Informal Metropolis.
During the same era, architect and theorist Christopher Alexander, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, envisioned a more human-centered scale of housing. Inspired by British anti-industrial thinkers John Ruskin and William Morris and countercultural institutions like the Whole Earth Catalog, Alexander developed theories for creating communities designed, built, and governed by their residents. It was the polar opposite of Corbusier’s “towers-in-the-park” plan. His “pattern language” for building and community planning included directives to design for “good shape,” “deep interlock,” “echoes,” and “inner calm.” The manual for the method published in 1977 includes photographs of elements he considered exemplary, such as narrow walking paths and “old people everywhere.”
The two opposing visions for housing converged in an unlikely place: the remote and arid border city of Mexicali. In 1975, the Autonomous University of Baja California invited Alexander to help the city tackle its housing crisis. Alexander was put in charge of the Mexicali Experimental Project, in which Baja California’s Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers (ISSSTECALI) would provide workers with loans and land, while Alexander would guide them in putting his resident-first method to the test.
Five families were chosen to help design and build houses suited to their needs and the extreme desert climate. They pressed and baked their own adobe bricks in an area called the Builder’s Yard, or El Sitio, and they installed the vaulted roofs—made of curved wood rafters and concrete. The resulting interiors, with thick walls and natural, handmade materials, exemplified Alexander’s vision for dwellings that inspired a contemplative, human-scale approach to living.
Though 25 more houses were initially planned, ISSSTECALI terminated the housing experiment, deeming the homes too slow to build. Today, the structures remain intact, and some are still occupied by the original families who participated in the experiment.
The home that remains most similar to its original form is that of the architect himself. Across the street from the five homes, adjacent to the Builder’s Yard, Alexander oversaw the construction of his own apartment. Like the houses across the street, Alexander’s apartment features low ceilings, narrow passageways, and hand-shaped archways. It also contains a small courtyard, shaded by a mesquite tree, that is laid with widely spaced stones to allow “spontaneous gardens” to grow between the cracks. The space eventually became the property of the Autonomous University of Baja California. In the 1990s, the university offered it as housing to a professor who had moved with his family to Mexicali. One of his children, Pastizal Zamudio, would grow up to become an artist.
In 2022, Andrea Torreblanca of the San Diego–based INSITE reached out to Zamudio to commission a work. Zamudio expressed interest in developing a project based on their family’s unique former home. Coincidentally, at the same time, architectural historians Felipe Orensanz and Alejandro Peimbert had been researching the experimental project and its relationship to other housing projects in the era. They joined these institutional, investigatory, and artistic efforts to create the Mexicali Experimental Project exhibit.
Inaugurated in November 2024 at Bread & Salt Gallery in San Diego, California, the exhibit is on display in Mexicali at the Museum of the UABC’s Institute for Cultural Research through September 2025. The ample gallery space in central Mexicali is filled with structures built of two-by-fours that resemble the forms used to shape adobe walls. Mounted on them is a mix of historic artifacts, images, and didactic material—the result of Orensanz’s research—along with installation and video art by Zamudio and illustrations by California multimedia artist Cynthia Hooper.
The opening image shows the construction of the Experimental Project’s unique wavy roofs (see photo up top). A woman wearing jeans and a cardigan crouches atop a cinderblock wall, her hand resting on the star where several curved wooden rafters cross. Another two-by-four structure, labeled “The Problem,” holds images that attest to the postwar housing crisis. It includes a print of a famous 1966 image by photographer Rodrigo Moya of the Tlatelolco complex—Mexico City’s largest and best-known unidad habitacional—titled Hipotecados (“Mortgagors”), emphasizing the strange geometric sameness of the complex, along with an image of Cartolandia, or “Cardboardland,” a Tijuana shantytown that housed 30,000 people. Another section shows images from Alexander’s 1977 book A Pattern Language. Other sections are titled “The City,” “The Alternatives,” and “The Production of Housing.” In a series of drawings (oil and colored pencil on paper), Hooper depicts the homes as they are now, including one remodeled with a second story and another painted pink.
Zamudio’s installation is also built atop one of the two-by-four wall forms. It intervenes in the structures to add decorative ornamentation and personal effects. Some evoke other projects designed by Alexander—such as the addition of bamboo, a reference to the Eishin Campus, a high school in Japan—and some speak to Zamudio’s experiences working as an agricultural laborer in the United States. The installation seems like an example of Alexander’s method in miniature: Zamudio transforms the construction form built of standard dimensional lumber into a personal, nostalgic curio cabinet that is human scale and homey, the type of object Alexander might have imagined as the focal point of the interior of one of the experimental project’s homes.
Today, Mexicali is a sprawling industrial city, filled with boulevards choked with traffic, and its population is approaching 1 million. The border continues to drive its economy, mostly in the form of assembly plants for U.S. companies. Once again, the city, along with many others across Mexico, faces a deficit of affordable housing.
In recent decades, the Mexican government has sought to meet housing needs not through multifamily complexes woven into the fabric of cities but through large developments of terraced housing built far from urban centers. These developments, built by private subcontractors, have been criticized for their shoddy construction as well as their distance from schools, stores, and employment opportunities.
As President Claudia Sheinbaum commits to building 1 million housing units during her presidency, it’s clear that a new approach to housing is long overdue. Though large-scale developments remain the most effective way to address a mass housing crisis, the Mexicali Experimental Project’s unique attempt to bring philosophical imagination into state-sponsored housing serves as a reminder that human-scale aesthetics are just as important to design as economies of scale.