“I think most people have given up hope for realizing beauty. They assume it is not available and yet paradoxically find it too painful to admit this assumption.” —Christopher Alexander, 1991.

At first glance, the site is not terribly different from the other houses clustered on the adjoining blocks. But zoom in a little closer, and you’ll see an odd fractal-like pattern of construction on this particular parcel, and strange rounded roofs that stand in stark contrast to the arched shingles and sheet metal of their neighbors.

Half of the site has since been demolished, the buildings removed. A great tree now grows in their stead, shading a dusty dirt parking lot. The structures that remain—a half crescent with an open courtyard—have been converted. They were once the homes of a handful of families that participated in a novel experiment, and now they serve as a community medical clinic run by the local university.

The site is where, many years ago, an architect tested out a new system for building—a rebuke to the mechanized, disconnected way that we make our places today. He had received an invitation from the state government of Baja California in Mexico, who had asked him to put the ideas in his writing into practice. 

Instead of the typical form of development, in which an architect might create a design for a building, and then hand it off to a team of contractors who actually built it, this new group of homes would be created in partnership with their future inhabitants. The families would help lay out their future home, and they would take part in its construction. This pursuit was aided by a small budget, about $25,000 for each home in today’s U.S. dollars, in the form of a loan from the state credit union.

With chalk, they laid out the site plans for the homes and central courtyard. “Everyone felt that it was their decision,” the architect later wrote, “that they had created it; and that it was not only theirs, but unique in all the world; it was their home.” He called this principle, that the families plan their houses for themselves, “a fundamental right.” 

They were not architects or builders, but water meter inspectors, court stenographers, clerks and nurses, all excited by the idea that they would get to shape their place.

We have a small version of this today—for those who are fortunate enough to own their homes and can afford to—in the form of a renovation or remodel. A process, as memorialized on HGTV shows like Fixer Upper, of buildings being adapted to meet the needs of their inhabitants. 

Typically, though, those homes are amended after the fact. The goal in this experiment was to create a simple process that would cheaply and efficiently create custom homes from the beginning. A way to build quality, affordable, non-standardized homes in collaboration with their future inhabitants.

One family designed their house with their daughter’s bedroom at the center, while also leaving room to put in a barbershop up front in the future. Another family, a single mother with ten children, designed a large family room, a “maze of rooms and alcoves” for the children to sleep, and space for a future workshop. One family, intensely private, outlined an elongated structure with the master bedroom as far as possible from the front entrance. Another family, keen on keeping company, emphasized the dining and living rooms and front porch in their design. 

It was vital that each family take part in the home’s construction, though this was often difficult work. The architect recalled advising them: “Remember, this is something that is only happening once in your life: for a few weeks it will be hard—a time to remember. But at the same time, it will be a sort of party all the time. If we do it like that, it will be wonderful.” They celebrated completing the project milestones often, holding parties in the courtyard with cerveza and carne asada well into the night.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they received little support from government officials. The architect recalled the “bookish dissatisfaction” of visiting dignitaries, who were frustrated by the experiment’s uneven progress, unfinished areas, and lack of conventional plans. He contrasted this with the “palpable reality of the families and their delight,” the great satisfaction that they felt living in a place they had designed, that their own hands had wrought. 

“They have made their own stuff, they have made themselves solid in the world, have shaped the world as they have shaped themselves,” he wrote. “They have created their own lives, not in the half-conscious, underground, interior way which we all do, but manifestly, out there on their own land: they are alive, they breathe the breath of their own houses.”

The project concluded and the families moved into their new homes—and unforeseen problems cropped up.

There were quibbles about who was responsible for taking care of which part of the common courtyard. A few teenagers started harassing other families in the complex. Soon, fences went up, as well as bars over windows. The communal space at the center was no more. 

There were changes to the architecture, too. Some of the rounded, ‘vaulted’ roofs were replaced to match those of neighboring buildings (which made maintenance much easier). As time went on, rooms were demolished and added to make way for carports or new family members.

The architect had, perhaps, failed his own principles. His vaulted roofs and common courtyard were not rooted in local, vernacular architecture, but his own impositions. While interesting in theory, they lacked practicality, a grounding in the real needs and culture of the area.

But the core idea at the heart of this small village of houses still stands: incremental, adaptable structures, made by locals, and malleable enough to be easily changed to meet the needs of their inhabitants. Even after the initial construction had ceased, they were not finished growing. Like all enduring architecture, they have lived many lives, and even after a half century, they are still evolving. 

At the conclusion of his recounting, the architect imagines his process taking place in a hypothetical city of one million. He estimates a great new system, of five hundred architect-builders like himself, working with households on a few clusters of houses at a time, using a decentralized system of building materials scattered all across the city. 

And, in this decentralized and adaptable development process, there is the creation of a new culture of building, of new and varied forms emerging across each neighborhood, from the needs and desires of their residents, little clusters of five, six, or ten houses, each deeply representative of the people who will help build and then dwell in them.

Of course, to transition to such a system would require a huge paradigm shift. But at the very least it is an ethic we can hope to embody in how we grow our cities and towns: a narrowing of the gap between people and the buildings that serve them, a turning toward more adaptive and incremental structures—a reassignment of cultural values and regulations and practices of production back towards a more human-centered feedback loop.

Eventually, the tired, stifling old ways would fall away, and something more responsive, more human would take their place.

Further reading:

• Ana Laura Ruesjas, ‘The Mexicali experimental project: an analysis of its changes,’ 2020. McGill University.

• Christopher Alexander, ‘The Production of Houses,’ 1984. Oxford University Press.

• Thomas Fischer, ‘Revisiting Mexicali,’ 1991. Progressive Architecture.