Fernanda Canales on Architecture as Public Space
On 8-December, Fernanda Canales shared her work on “Architecture as Public Space” as the final installment of the 2021 Fall Urbanism Lecture Series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT. Fernanda Canales is the founder of Fernanda Canales Architecture, a practice committed to architecture, urban design and research.
In the lecture, Fernanda describes the origins of the city as explicitly tied to the origins of the home, that the histories of space making and separation from nature underwrite the core tenets of the modern city. Canales focuses on the intrinsic “unwritten” relationship between the architectural project and the city. Relationship between “projects”, “systems” and “infrastructures”. She tracks the cultural constructs of the architectural project, diving deeply into the contextual framing of each.
Exploring the importance of integrated ownership of public space and the private home, Fernanda makes space for alternative urban dynamics. Her work suggests that the home is simultaneously an extension of the city and a cumulative project of public space making. Fernanda works with local craft, knowledge, labor and community to produce beautiful spaces that can be inside and outside at the same time and engender public, private and collective occupations of the city. Her work brings life back to the commons.
By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
