“Beyond Geometry: From Candela’s Material Experiments to Productora’s Anticipating Forms,” En Blanco #39, special issue on Productora (2025): 114-123.
Excerpt:
… So far, Candela’s housing projects have rarely been considered,(22) and yet his numerous schemes, involvement with organizations and governments, and notes to colleagues and friends about the Cuban effort, among others, suggest an architectural practice that went far beyond the acclaimed structural exuberance of his hypars. And as we consider projects as far-spanning as the rural school for indigenous children or his housing projects for remote communities, connections to contemporary practices become rather plausible. PRODUCTORA, in particular, comes to mind. Not because their projects look alike to Candela’s but because both practices deploy geometries that are simultaneously efficient and generous, they sponsor a sense of agency, and they are dimensioned for the collective, or at least for something beyond the individual. Of course, there are the obvious academic references that link the two: from the Mexican Modernism exhibition that PRODUCTORA designed in 2010 and which prominently featured Candela, to their 2012 renovation of Juan José Díaz Infante’s fiberglass shells. But, more important for our purpose, are their similarly bold and precise uses of geometry. For the 2019 Urban Park in Tultitlán, for example, PRODUCTORA deployed abstract forms to create platforms for social interaction and chance encounters (FIG. 14). And, in the same year, their Housing prototype in Apán, utilized a central brick vault that accommodates all circulation, rethinks conventional room layouts, and accepts changes and expansions. By spatializing the interstitial zone between domestic spaces, the vault permits, or better incentivizes, the activities of one room to spill into the other without dictating a particular use, order, or direction. It rather anticipates and affords different forms of inhabitation and action –a projective open-endedness that allows us to conceive of the central zone to be converted into an interior just as much as it lets us foresee the expansion of the system into a series of vaults in one direction or an extrapolation into a continuous, linear corridor in the other. It is here where both practices meet and go beyond geometry.
