Gonchar, Joann
Order in the courtyard : Remote vacatin house is designed around a series of patios - Vol.207(4), April - New York BNP Media 2019 - 78-83
If you know the work of a particular architect well, you can often spot his or her preferred forms, identify favored materials, or discern a particular aesthetic. But that is not the case with the buildings of Fernanda Canales, a Mexican architect known for her small but polished body of work. Each of her projects looks as though it could have been created by a different designer. Among her single-family residences, one urban house is a Modernist composition of crisp, overlapping and projecting white concrete boxes, while another, in a popular vacation area, is a rustic assemblage of stone-enclosed volumes with pitched roofs supported by exposed timber structure. And her Casa Bruma, in a secluded community about 100 miles southwest of Mexico City, is a village-like cluster of discrete one- and two-story structures formed in assertive black concrete. Her most recent house, Casa Terreno, a weekend retreat for her own family, has yet another expression. The 6,500-square-foot residence, in the same remote development as Bruma, is a horizontal ensemble of textured red brick walls and terra-cotta-tiled barrel vaults. As diverse as these projects might sound, however, they have a strong commonality: all are conceived around open-air living spaces, building on the long tradition of the courtyard in Mexican architecture. It is a theme Canales returns to again and again, “even though the formal solution is always different,” she says.
Architect Works (AR-AW)
Order in the courtyard : Remote vacatin house is designed around a series of patios - Vol.207(4), April - New York BNP Media 2019 - 78-83
If you know the work of a particular architect well, you can often spot his or her preferred forms, identify favored materials, or discern a particular aesthetic. But that is not the case with the buildings of Fernanda Canales, a Mexican architect known for her small but polished body of work. Each of her projects looks as though it could have been created by a different designer. Among her single-family residences, one urban house is a Modernist composition of crisp, overlapping and projecting white concrete boxes, while another, in a popular vacation area, is a rustic assemblage of stone-enclosed volumes with pitched roofs supported by exposed timber structure. And her Casa Bruma, in a secluded community about 100 miles southwest of Mexico City, is a village-like cluster of discrete one- and two-story structures formed in assertive black concrete. Her most recent house, Casa Terreno, a weekend retreat for her own family, has yet another expression. The 6,500-square-foot residence, in the same remote development as Bruma, is a horizontal ensemble of textured red brick walls and terra-cotta-tiled barrel vaults. As diverse as these projects might sound, however, they have a strong commonality: all are conceived around open-air living spaces, building on the long tradition of the courtyard in Mexican architecture. It is a theme Canales returns to again and again, “even though the formal solution is always different,” she says.
Architect Works (AR-AW)