Since JM|A+D’s inception we have asked every employee to champion a charity and have participated in service builds south of Ensendada addressing a desperate housing demand for migrant communities traveling north to work in the agricultural fields of Baja. These are transformative experiences for the families, many living under tarps held up by pallets on dirt floors, but also for build teams.

A dirt floor is unsanitary. Half a million kids die a year from diarrhea. A dirt floor breeds respiratory and parasitic diseases. A concrete floor solves a problem.

There is something profoundly satisfying in a problem you can solve with your hands.

Over the years the organization, Baja Bound, has developed its own typology of architecture in these vibrantly painted simple structures built on weekends by strangers who mostly have never swung a hammer; comparative monuments of firmness, commodity and delight next to the impoverished living conditions three and a half hours drive from our Manhattan Beach office.

As the organization has built those houses they have also built connections with local orphanages in the community and developed an education program, which to be honest we never paid much attention to in the past.

Architecture can solve problems. Our dreams exist to foreshadow reality but education isn’t really our forte. We know concrete floors.

The second morning of the last build, we arrived on site to see a sort of Wood Henge assembled on a piece of siding from the rafter and cuts of the previous day’s construction, curious to a passing architect with an affinity for Lincoln Logs. The next morning we arrived to a model of a house made by the families only daughter, Rebeca. While the accuracy of the fenestration was questionable, the recognizable joy in that model was not. There is an undeniable familiarity in the gable roofed form so many of us drew at that age, our first graphic representation of the concept of “home” family holding hands in front.
And an accompanying recognition that me and Rebeca, we’re not really strangers either.
The US imported nearly $3 billion in avocados, just avocados, last year alone from Mexico and to stand in the home of one of the farmers, it is hard to ignore this unevenly shared harvest. As architects we see the world as it is and the world as it can be, and so rarely have the opportunity to open a pathway otherwise closed without advocacy.
It seems we can do better than concrete floors. Through the patronage of our clients and our Partnership with The Greatness Collective, Baja Build and Baja Ed, we’ve made the commitment to sponsor Rebeca’s Education, as far as she cares to go.

Charity and philanthropy differ in that the former addresses a symptom through donations of time and money whereas the latter affects sustained change through strategy, scale and systems. Small firms have no time for small objectives; we are fueled by moral hunger and belief that there is a better way, that there is a world in which our humanity determines our economic system.

GDP is too often the most important measure of our success as a country, our year end P&L statements our success as a company, time card factors to measure the success of our projects but these are metrics of output by quantity over time not quality of our life. It prioritizes activities in the short term that boost our year end performance even if those activities are detrimental to our environment, our mental health, our well being.

The financial success of our projects matters. If a project isn’t cash positive it can’t be a project. But we are seeing the emergence of a value system beyond the financial metrics. It isn’t the only thing that matters.

There is an emerging resonance with well being prompting conversations leading to fundamental questions of what we value, what kind of people we are, are we happy? When we ask “What do you want to be, brick?” there are acceptable answers paramount to the well-being of a society considering access to green spaces, access to education, the happiness of children.

We are proud that our philanthropic efforts and that our sponsorship is helping to further this conversation; that we can be a part of Rebeca’s story. It’s not easy to stand center ring throwing punches for what we believe, but this is important. Besides, if not us then who?

If you are interested in donating materials, or financially or participating in a build, please contact sd@jmadstudio.com to learn more!

JM|A+D in the Community | We’re Going Back to Baja!