"In Mexico, This Architect Designs for Those Who Stay: Fernanda Canales represents a new generation of Mexican women architects," Metropolis, July/August 2026.
Fernanda Canales’s office is a peaceful living room overlooking her backyard in Lomas de Chapultepec, a reserved neighborhood northwest of Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City’s largest park. Rows of bird’s nests sit on a wall of shelves near the picture windows, complemented by various orchids in planters. There are no lines of architects glued to screens at long orthogonal desks. Instead, she has longstanding relationships with associates contracted on project-based assignments, from drawings to renderings and communications. (Likewise for the models, which are fabricated in a craftsman’s workshop.) It’s a feature of her office that predated the remote-work era: As a mother raising children at home and a writer-researcher-architect, she lives a life well suited to it.
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Since 2020, Canales has received a flurry of commissions from SEDATU—Mexico's federal development agency—to design public spaces in small Sonoran towns along the Arizona border. Designed during the pandemic with minimal access to sites and programs specified by the government, the projects resulting from the contracts made the most of very limited construction budgets and minimized future maintenance needs.
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“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. “There’s always a desire to cross through, to go to the other side, but not to stay. So, the question is, how do you design a city of transit, a pass-through city for those who stay and live permanently in it?” Maybe by listening carefully to the ones who stayed.
Full story in July/August Metropolis [subcription link]
