Can good housing be accessible to all?

Fernanda Canales: According to the Mexican architect, low-income social housing should follow the same design principles as private residences, with only budget setting the two apart. She takes up the challenge and reaps the reward of creating homes with light, air and space for everyone

- Ellie Stathaki

Fernanda Canales points excitedly to a drawing in one of her more recent books, showing a spread full of architectural axonometrics. ‘This is a project from the 1960s,’ she says. ‘It was a mini-unit that can grow in a modular way. It was designed by Christopher Alexander and it’s so inspiring. I draw on projects like this.’

It was through working on books like this one that the Mexican architect became fascinated by residential design in her home country, and in particular low-income housing. Her latest book, Shared Structures, Private Spaces: Housing in Mexico (published by Actar) is the result of years of research into larger-scale housing. It’s just one of her deep dives into the subject, though this is the deepest, taking in a whopping 70 case studies of housing projects from 1917 to 2017. Some are better known, some less so, and they range from the very first example of a low-income housing project in Mexico to the classic regional modernists’ works and contemporary projects.

‘While doing this book I realised that there were some Luis Barragán low-income housing projects that had never even been published,’ she says. ‘Most people only know of his privileged, private homes.’