As New York City's building boom continues, seemingly unfazed by the ongoing mortgage crisis, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently announced a massive development that would erase and rebuild Willets Point. The "Iron Triangle" of junkyards and auto body repair shops, incredibly polluted and lacking sewers and sidewalks, was long ago described by Robert Moses as "an eyesore and a disgrace to the borough of Queens." Following in the footsteps of the master builder, the mayor has the authority to clear the land through the use of eminent domain, reclaim it, then sell it to private developers.

Meanwhile, a more utopian approach to rebuilding communities is about to be revealed in NoHo through an exhibition at the PARC Foundation Gallery. Estudio Teddy Cruz: The Practice of Encroachment will introduce the Guatemalan-born architect who has embraced one of the most important social issues confronting the U.S. - immigration - as the touchstone of his practice.

Left: Manufactured Sites: Emergency Housing. Right: Casa Familiar: Housing as Process. Both by Estudio Teddy Cruz, courtesy of PARC Foundation.

Cruz, whose architectural studio is located at the border between San Diego and Tijuana, embraces the density and mix of housing, commerce and social interactions there. Rather than neutralizing this vitality, he proposes that planners and policymakers should accommodate and nurture it as a way of creating more imaginative and inclusive neighborhoods.

The provocative title of the exhibition stems from Cruz's process-driven practice, which confronts the conflicts that typically exist between public and private interests. A case in point is his plan for affordable housing in the town of Hudson, New York. Here poor residents live just blocks away from a gentrified shopping district that has sprung up during the last decade or so as well-off New Yorkers began a migration to the town.

Cruz took ideas developed through his work along the U.S. and Mexican border to bridge the divide between rich and poor in Hudson. Using input from the residents, gathered through a process of neighborhood workshops, he came up with a scheme that reflects the way people want to live. Small-scale affordable apartments, each with its own entry, which wrap around an existing community garden, are among the features designed to repair what has become a "social emergency."

Hudson 2+4 is just one of the many projects that will be on view at the PARC Foundation Gallery, with architectural models, renderings, maps and more. The opening reception is July 10 from 6 to 8 pm, with Teddy Cruz in attendance. The Practice of Encroachment continues through October 25, 2008.

Estudio Teddy Cruz is also represented in Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, on view through August 17^th. In addition, the U.S. State Department announced last month that its official entry to the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale is the exhibition Into the Open: Positioning Practice. The exhibition will be organized by William Menking, founder of The Architect's Newspaper, along with co-curators Aaron Levy, Executive Director and Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, and Andrew Sturm, Director of Architecture for the PARC Foundation. The exhibition is conceived in collaboration with architects Teddy Cruz and Deborah Gans.