Stuckeman School to welcome San Diego-based architectural practice for lecture

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, principals of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, will join the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School virtually at 6 p.m. on Oct. 19 as part of the school’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture, the event will be livestreamed by WPSU.

In the lecture, titled “Unwalling Citizenship,” Cruz and Forman will discuss their work on "citizenship culture" at the United States-Mexico border, and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities. They ask, in this increasingly walled world and with the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere: Can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive democratic agendas?

Cruz and Forman’s San Diego-based practice investigates borders, informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public agendas in the San Diego-Tijuana, Mexico, border region and beyond. In 2012-13, they served as special advisers on civic and urban initiatives for the city of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they lead the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Community Stations, a network of public spaces across the border region co-developed between university and community for collaborative research and teaching on poverty and social equity. Their work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ArtPlace America, the PARC Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation, among others. 

Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, M+ in Hong Kong, the 2016 Shenzhen Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture, and the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale. Their work also is part of the permanent collection at MoMa. 

Cruz and Forman have recently published two monographs: “Spatializing Justice” and “Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up,” both by MIT Press and Hatje Cantz, with a third forthcoming, “Unwalling Citizenship,” to be published by Verso.

Cruz is a professor of public culture and urbanism in the Department of Visual Arts and the director of urban research in the Center on Global Justice at UCSD. The recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991, Cruz’s honors include the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the 2013 Architecture Award from the U.S. Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2018 Vilcek Prize in Architecture.

Forman is a professor of political theory and founding director of the Center on Global Justice at UCSD. She serves as co-chair of the University of California’s Global Climate Leadership Council, and served until 2019 on the Global Citizenship Commission, advising United Nations policy on human rights in the 21st century.