Villa Floresta: Transborder Living: Morphosis, Tijuana, and the Beginning of a Practice

Join us for a conversation between Thom Mayne, Felipe Orensanz and Marcel Sánchez Prieto.

Transborder Living is a series aimed at documenting often-overlooked architectural and urban histories across the Mexico-United States borderlands, with the idea of fostering other ways of reading the border not as a dividing line, but as a space of negotiation, adaptation, and change. This first volume revisits Villa Floresta, a cluster of five houses designed in 1975 on the outskirts of Tijuana by architects Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, and Livio Santini, regarded as Morphosis's first built project.

Villa Floresta: Morphosis, Tijuana, and the Beginning of a Practice is the inaugural book in the new Transborder Living series by Arquine. This series highlights often-neglected architectural and urban histories across the Mexico–United States borderlands. This first volume focuses on the history of five houses on the outskirts of Tijuana, regarded as Morphosis's first built project. It features texts by Todd Gannon, Thom Mayne, Michael Rotondi, and Livio Santini, complemented by historical writings from Esther McCoy and Dan MacMasters, and includes an introduction by Felipe Orensanz and Marcel Sanchez Prieto.

Thom Mayne founded Morphosis in 1972. He helped establish the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and has held teaching positions at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Berlage Institute, UCL Bartlett, and UCLA. His honors include the Pritzker Prize and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal. He has been the recipient of 29 Progressive Architecture Awards and over 120 AIA Awards, among many other recognitions.

Felipe Orensanz is a Mexico City-based architect and urbanist. His work has been supported by MacDowell, HKW Berlin, The People’s Forum, The New School’s ICSI, Art Omi, the Institute for Public Architecture, and Mexico’s National Endowment for the Arts (SNCA). He was awarded the Alfonso Caso Medal in 2010 and is co-author of the book Ciudad Independencia/Seguro Social.

Marcel Sánchez Prieto is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of San Diego. He is co-founder of the Transborder Association of Architectural Education (TAAE/ATEA) and CRO Studio. He has been recognized with the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, the Progressive Architecture Award, a Bogliasco Fellowship, The New School’s ICSI, and the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism.