James Baldwin once talked about the "low ceilings" of poor children's
lives - where hope and imagination are compressed. Award-winning San-Diego-based artist
and architect James Hubbell has "lifted the ceilings" for children in one of
Tijuana, Mexico's, poorest colonias. The beautiful pre- and primary school Hubbell
designed and helped build over eight years (with more than 1,000 volunteers), is a small
jewel, a prized possession of the families in Colonia Esperanza - and may suggest ways
that American school architecture can honor the dreams of future generations.
Most of the families in Tijuana are immigrants from other parts of Mexico. They don't
all mix well; there are a lot of cultural differences and tensions. Our thinking about the
Esperanza school was that if we could make it beautiful it would help bridge some of the
differences; it could act as a gathering place for children and for the wider community.
We also thought that such a school would attract the attention of the government and
the wealthy. There are something like 70 colonias, or neighborhoods, in Tijuana, and none
of them has really been planned, so in the government's eyes they don't quite exist. In
order to be seen or considered important, you have to first be named. Of course, you can
get named by committing great violence. That is often how poor communities get a name-by
being dangerous. But if you have a school and it's really beautiful and people know it and
want to come to the community to see it, then when you go down to the city offices and say
'we'd like sewers,' they know who you are. A beautiful school confers a certain degree of
power and prestige on the neighborhood.
We wanted to build a school that would say in its very design that the children
themselves are important. We accomplished this partly through the design and partly
because the families could see that there was a lot of love and effort put into the
building.
If you go to a school and the windows are coming out and the ceilings are falling in,
it's pretty clear that students are not really a priority. If we build ugly schools that
look and feel like prisons or holding pens, it's because that's where we think children
should be.
I've long been fascinated by the idea that the conscious world is made up of joy and
pathos, and that the way we strike a balance between joy and pathos in our everyday lives
is through beauty. Beauty can help us live well in a complicated world-it can act as a
bridge between hope and desperation.
When I went to Tijuana, I had to suspend my knowledge of how to make buildings and
instead learn from my immediate surroundings. How do the kids play in this desert city?
What dreams do the parents have for their children? By contemplating the surroundings,
observing the kids at play, I knew what to do.
What really matters comes through our physical relationship to the world and to each
other. It's important that kids feel comfortable in the natural world as well as in the
world of ideas. At the school, we wanted to encourage excitement about both ideas and real
things, so we started a permaculture garden - which to me is probably as important as the
school building itself. My feeling is that if a child knows he can grow a carrot, he
doesn't have to be frightened of going hungry, and he can then give himself over to the
pursuit of learning, laughing, and dreaming about the future.
