Teddy Cruz

“I didn’t want to have a conventional office of architecture where I would be designing boutique hotels or galleries or houses for the 1 percent,” architect Teddy Cruz said after winning the 2018 Vilcek Prize for Architecture. Instead, he's devoted his professional and academic life to understanding and improving the citizenship experience of people living along the U.S.-Mexico border. Cruz says, "It’s not enough to design the physical systems. We also need to design the political, civic, and economic processes that would enable those physical systems to be truly inclusive.” He is co-founder of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, one of seven firms selected to participate in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.  Cruz is director of the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Cross-Border Initiative, which promotes community-led solutions to urban design problems, and a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD. Updated July 2018