Teddy Cruz

Profile

MAYBE IT WAS the putrid stench of dead flesh that almost made Teddy Cruz faint. It could have been the formaldehyde. A senior at his Guatemalan high school, he had romanticized ideas of a doctor’s life — all of them put to rest the day he first observed an autopsy.

Months later, a still-impressionable Cruz walked into a studio where an architect sat at a drawing table, furiously scribbling at a design with a pencil in one hand and a cup of steaming hot chocolate in the other. Cruz made his decision — he would become an architect.

Traditional architecture eventually bored him. He went to college at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, then got his master’s in design at Harvard, easily fulfilling his architectural fantasy.

“But at some point the dissatisfaction grew,” Cruz says. “Architects will drown in their own studios just making pretty models, away from the gritty politics and economics of development.”

Now 45, Cruz was plopped directly into the middle of politics and development last August when he was appointed to the board of the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC), downtown’s redevelopment agency. Often the lone dissenter, Cruz — a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego and principal architect (though unlicensed) of Estudio Teddy Cruz — says it’s his search for improving on conventional ideas about public space that tends to put him on the other side of the vote.

“Today I was really outspoken,” Cruz says, sipping a beer at the Starlite Lounge, near his Mission Hills home. He had been arguing for a motion to add an option for developers to accommodate space for arts and cultural institutions in future developments in exchange for an increase in density, but the board voted to table it. His plea for the necessity of activating public space — surrounding the space with cultural uses rather than static beautification gestures like sculptures — apparently fell short.

Still, Cruz’s habit of speaking in academic yet surprisingly poetic terms has a record of being pretty convincing. “Teddy is an unbelievably poetic guy,” says architect Jonathan Segal. But Cruz isn’t satisfied with that description. He hopes his position with CCDC will give him the chance to put poetics into practice. He’s aware of critics, those who say he spends too much time theorizing and not enough time building. He has just a few completed projects, including a workspace for author Mike Davis and a new project in Barrio Logan, but Cruz says he has no interest in building for the sake of building. Instead, he says he’s interested in San Diego’s housing crisis and what he considers backward zoning and planning processes.

“The project in many ways is not the building but the boundaries that surround it,” he says, referring to his Barrio Logan project. “Ultimately,” he says, “I think no advances in affordable-housing design can be achieved without advances in housing policy, zoning and subsidy structures. Without transformations across these institutions, we are just going to reproduce the same architecture.”

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »