The Sedimentary Effect, a five-year project organised by the cultural organisation INSITE, based in San Diego county and Baja California in the United States and Mexico respectively, examines current perceptions of natural phenomena, architecture and spirituality through several micro histories of the regions in three chapters: A Timeless Way of Building, Erratic Fields, and The Spiritual Realm.

The title of the first chapter is based on the homonymous book by Christopher Alexander, an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. Invited by the government of Mexicali, Baja California in 1975-76, Alexander developed a social housing project through a process of collaboration and stakeholder participation. The builder’s yard for this experimental project, known as El Sitio, serves as the site for the pavilion Situations of Being. Curated by Andrea Torreblanca, El Sitio: A Timeless Way of Building was a three-day event held in May 2023, which focused on a context-specific theme and included three components requiring the curator's expertise. These included serving as guest editor for a special issue of the INSITE Journal, curating a long-term ‘Commission’ with artists to create work rooted in Mexicali, and organising ‘Conversations’ that will be presented both locally and in formats accessible to remote audiences. While the central courtyard of the experimental housing project hosts the Commission of Mexicali-based artist Pastizal Zamudio's project, Before the Last Rubble, in the Face of Dawn (2038), the pavilion Situations of Being in El Sitio facilitates Conversations around Alexander’s theories between architects, urbanists and philosophers.

Designed by Veintedoce Arquitectura and Localista, in collaboration with faculty and students from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC), the pavilion design is conceptualised around Alexander's 1977 book A Pattern Language. Developed across eight years, Volume 1, A Timeless Way of Building and its 1977 predecessor (incidentally the second Volume) constitute two halves of a comprehensive work. While A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning, the former provides the theory and instructions for the use of that language. The language itself is a catalogue of timeless entities constituting 253 patterns, presenting iterative solutions to unceasing challenges in the built environment, with scales ranging from construction details to regional planning.

The pavilion emerges as a composition of overlaid patterns, translated from a brief which outlines programmatic and contextual forces. Programmatically, the brief asked for a walkthrough of El Sitio, a space for screening and 'Conversations'. Contextually, the space was to be a response to the tropical climate of Mexicali, as well as the immediate site it sits on. The patterns that define the pavilion ‘Situations of Being’ embody diverse scenarios and states in which humans exist and interact, encompassing not just physical presence but also the emotional, psychological, and social dimensions of human experience. By examining how people move, perceive, and feel within the space, a curated selection of patterns from A Pattern Language arbitrates the pavilion design.

The many situations of being that emerge from this examination include sitting, lying down, observing, seeing the breeze, feeling awe, sharing, listening — to really listen — to dancing, daydreaming, to sleep, eating, et al. For instance, 'Pattern 106: Positive Outdoor Space' from the book demonstrates the distinction between negative and positive outdoor spaces. Characterised by a shapelessness when it is conceived as a residue of the built form, negative outdoor space is a figure-ground reversal of the latter, which is illustrated as an open space with a distinct and definite shape, as important as the shapes of the building which surround it.

The positive open space in the pavilion emerges from a geometry composed of a set of concentric circles, split, stretched and further split longitudinally, articulating a distinct rectangular open space, rounded at its shorter sides. A long communal table along the longitudinal axis of the rectangle serves as the nucleus, directing the attention of its 120 possible users towards Conversations reminiscing on Alexander’s theories—about housing production, communal living, architectural philosophy and urbanism in border cities.

‘Pattern 224: Canvas Roofs’ celebrates the beauty of tents and canvas awnings. The soft and supple canvas shares a seemingly sensual relationship with the natural elements, submitting to the sun, wind and light and—compared to its hard conventional counterpart—rendering an exceedingly intimate relationship between the natural environment and the space it encloses. In the El Sitio pavilion, a fabric canopy, raised on a framework of pinewood, accentuates the central communal space.

A house or any building built with some canvas will touch all the elements more nearly than it can when it is made only with hard conventional materials. – Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

Draped in the form of arches, the canopy lends soft light as well as partial shade to the space enclosing the pavilion. While the arched profile of the canopy is evocative of the wooden vaults at El Sitio, the distinct canary yellow colour punctuating the fabric and accenting the pinewood posts recalls the desert flora of Mexicali, and collectively displays the microhistory of the region. Moreover, to address the tropical climate of Mexicali, the canopy extends down to create vertical drapes that provide shade during the evening hours.

The bands that constitute the seating are composed of modules at staggered heights, designed as such to accommodate these various situations of being. The resultant amphitheatre-like space allows its users to sit, lie, to observe, to daydream quite as efficiently as it engages their attention to listen to the Conversations under the canopy.

Additionally, its modularity allows for gaps where pathways connect the pavilion to the entrance, the garden and the building. A band extending to the south garden, culminating at a quiet corner under a canopy of trees, demonstrates ‘Pattern 171: Tree Spaces’.

Through this examination of often-overlooked microhistories of the region, Sedimentary Effect not only provides alternate ways to perceive the region but also highlights their impact on crucial contemporary challenges in a broader context. The project, as a work-in-progress, is progressively shared in stages as research, public presentations, and alliances with institutions. Currently, the curation of an exhibition on Alexander’s complex in Mexicali, to be presented in San Diego, California is underway, while an edition of the INSITE journal is due for publication at the end of the year.

The pavilion ‘Situations of Being’, while itself transient, eternally captures the essence of the social housing complex by Christopher Alexander, a cultural microhistory lost to time. It stands as an invaluable interpretation of selected patterns enlisted in A Pattern Language, and as such is an iteration of a language that enables multiple outcomes. As explained by the authors in the introduction of the book, “This language, like English, can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. This difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently.”