03/27/18

AMES, Iowa — Internationally renowned architect and urbanist Teddy Cruz will share his work in a lecture Monday, April 9, at Iowa State University.

Cruz will present “Cross-Border Citizens” at 6 p.m. in Kocimski Auditorium, room 101 College of Design. His talk is sponsored by the College of Design and the Department of Graphic Design.

Cruz is a professor of public culture and urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is known around the world for his urban research on the Tijuana/San Diego border, advancing border neighborhoods as sites of cultural production from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing and public space.

He also is a principal of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based San Diego political and architectural practice, in partnership with University of California, San Diego political theorist Fonna Forman. Cruz and Forman lead a variety of urban curatorial initiatives, including the Civic Innovation Lab to rethink public space and civic engagement; the UCSD Cross-Border Initiative to promote research and practice focused on regional territories of poverty; and the UCSD Community Stations to foster knowledge exchange between the university and marginalized communities.

Additionally, they collaborated with former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus to develop the Bi-national Citizenship Culture Survey, an unprecedented protocol that surveyed cross-border civic infrastructure, public trust and social norms, to generate new shared urban policies between the municipalities of San Diego and Tijuana as well as collaborative strategies for cross-border urban intervention.

Cruz’s architectural and artistic projects have been exhibited at internationally renowned venues, including the Tijuana Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Carnegie Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Art Institute, Casa de America in Madrid, Spain, and Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement at the Museum of Modern Art. He studied at Rafael Landivar University, Guatemala City; California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Contacts

Bernard Canniffe, Graphic Design, (515) 294-6743, canniffe@iastate.edu
Heather Sauer, Design Communications, (515) 294-9289, hsauer@iastate.edu

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