The Mexicali Experimental Project: A Contemplative, Human-Scale Approach to Housing on the Border

In the 1970s, the Mexican state worked with an avant-garde architect to build unique homes for workers in Mexicali. Could this forgotten experiment hold answers for Mexico’s housing crisis today?

The Mexicali Experimental Project exhibition at the UABC Institute for Cultural Research Museum in Mexicali. (Photo credit: Teresa Rodríguez Ruiz Esparza)

West of Mexicali’s city center, on an ordinary street of working-class homes, look closely and you’ll notice something different on the horizon. Instead of the flat laminate roofs common across the low…