Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

A lecture by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman with response by Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor, Columbia GSAPP, organized as part of the new Building Science and Technology series Tech Talks.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego transgressing conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy. The practice investigates issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure, and public culture, with a special emphasis on Latin American cities. Cruz + Forman lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. From 2012-13 they served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they lead the UCSD Community Stations, a platform for community-engaged research and teaching on poverty and social equity in the border region.

Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and M+ Hong Kong. They represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. They co-edited Informal Market Worlds Reader: The Architecture of Economic Pressure (Rotterdam: nai010); and have two forthcoming monographs: Top-Down / Bottom-Up: The Research and Practice of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Berlin: Hatje Cantz); and The Political Equator: Unwalling Citizenship (London: Verso).

Teddy Cruz is a professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Fonna Forman is a professor of Political Theory and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice at UC San Diego.