Mexican Architect Fernanda Canales Gains Recognition

Fernanda Canales is part of a new generation of Mexican women architects making a name for themselves in the industry. Her office, located in a peaceful living room overlooking her backyard in Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico City, is a reflection of her lifestyle as a mother and writer-researcher-architect, which predates the remote-work era. Instead of rows of desks with architects glued to screens, Canales has longstanding relationships with associates who work with her on a project-by-project basis.

Her office setup is a reflection of her lifestyle as a mother and writer-researcher-architect, which predates the remote-work era. Canales’s own-designed furniture pieces are distributed throughout her household, including her new Unfolding Collection, which will be introduced by the Mexican furniture company Omet this year. The collection features pieces like the Nido side table/nightstand, which has hidden tiers, and the Cascada metal side table, which can be transformed into a step stool.

Canales’s career was launched by her careful observation of domestic space, which is fitting given that she has situated her practice within her own home. About a dozen years ago, she built a one-to-one model of a typical affordable apartment for an exhibition at the Galería Metropolitana, one of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s cultural spaces. The model highlighted the mistakes made in the design of these apartments, such as bedrooms that couldn’t fit a full-size bed and kitchens that were impractical.

Canales’s goal was to make visible the small mistakes that, when multiplied by the thousands or millions, stop being small and become big social problems. Her work has been influenced by her teaching at design schools, including Columbia University, and her research on the history of housing typologies. She has also produced a two-volume illustrated history of Mexican architecture, based on her PhD thesis at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid.

Women Leading Mexican Architecture

Canales is part of a group of Mexican women architects who have gained international recognition in recent years, including Frida Escobedo, Tatiana Bilbao, Rozana Montiel, and Gabriela Carrillo. She collaborated with Escobedo on a publicly financed, do-it-yourself housing project for the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers (INFONAVIT) in 2017.

In the 2010s, Canales focused on designing single-family houses for private clients, often situating them on remote sites with no running water, electricity, or waste treatment. She used large cisterns to collect rainwater and incorporated courtyards to mediate between public and private space. Her design, the Casa Bruma, features an “exploded” plan that arranges isolated volumes around a courtyard to preserve all of the existing trees on the site.

Designing Public Spaces

Since 2020, Canales has received commissions from SEDATU, Mexico’s federal development agency, to design public spaces in small Sonoran towns along the Arizona border. These projects, including the Border Library and Public Park in Agua Prieta and the Border Overlook and Market Plaza in Naco, were designed with minimal construction budgets and maintenance needs in mind. Despite these limitations, the spaces feel generous and offer a refuge from the desert climate. For the library, a group of families who had been organizing a reading club collaborated to donate the books.

The Encinos Sports Center in Naco, another project designed by Canales, offers an inviting sense of openness beneath a canted shade structure. They’re places where a transitional community, often passing back and forth daily between the U.S. and Mexico, finds temporary shelter, raised by considered architecture. “Everything has a certain visibility. The idea is that the rooftop becomes a terrace to see the city of Naco from above for the first time, because normally they are very horizontal cities where a wall divides the city between Mexico and the United States,” Canales explains.

Canales’s work is characterized by her attention to the needs of the people who will be using the spaces she designs. By listening carefully to the ones who stay, she hopes to create architecture that is responsive to the needs of the community. The Mexico-United States border region presents unique challenges for architects, with its harsh desert climate and transient population.