His construction firm, Cubiertas ALA, begun in 1950 in partnership with his brother Antonio and sister Julia, participated in Mexico’s rapid industrialization in the postwar years, as it completed over 800 factories and warehouses in the 1950s and 1960s. His work in residential construction is similarly marked by dedication to simplicity, whether in the execution of single-family homes (Romero residence, 1952) or apartment houses. Candela flourished in this environment his work in the design and construction of prismatic slab shells of the Hidalgo, Convent, and Monte Alpas schools (1953) are examples of his concern for sound structural design and economy, as is his later work in designing the Zaragoza and Candelaria Metro Stations (1967). Mexican architects and structural engineers were being called on to envision and construct innovative, multifunction structures on the city’s unstable subsoil.
He encountered a vital nation emerging from a decade of revolution and another of reconstruction. These structures attest to his technical expertise and his fluency in geometry as well as his sense of poetry, as seen in what are widely regarded as his free-edged masterpieces, Las Manantiales Restaurant (1958), where the structure, consisting of an octagonal groined vault composed of four intersecting hypars, appears, lotus-like, to float on the waters at Xochimilco, and La Jacaranda Night Club, designed in collaboration with Juan Sordo Madaleno (1957), an innovative shell derived from the intersection of three hypars, a form in complete harmony with the surrounding shoreline.Ĭandela arrived in Mexico City in 1939, part of the diaspora of Spanish intellectuals, architects, artists, and other professionals who were fleeing a country wracked by civil war. His forms are extremely reductive and simple, and his approach is clearly seen in works such as his ultrathin shells, particularly the hypar shell (1.5 centimeters) of the Cosmic Rays Pavilion (1952) at the new campus of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and in the vaults of the Mexico City Stock Exchange (1955).Ĭandela’s genius in devising new methods of calculating shell forms is illustrated by a variety of roof constructions, such as the simple umbrella, and short and long vaults. BIOGRAPHY / TIMELINE / FURTHER READING / RELATEDįélix Candela’s works in Mexico, the majority of which were executed between 19, provide some of the finest examples of functionality fused with plastic expression that exist in that nation to date.
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