CANO VERA arquitectura

Juan Carlos Cano and Paloma Vera founded CANO VERA arquitectura in Mexico City in 2007, and Fermín Andrade joined the firm as partner in 2019. Initially oriented toward social housing design, the practice’s portfolio has since expanded to include large scale institutional, cultural, and infrastructural projects. Uniting expertise in both architectural and urban design, CANO VERA arquitectura’s work demonstrates a consistent social orientation and sensitivity to context expressed through ambitiously scaled forms. In the words of its founders, the practice believes that “the specific can transform the whole.”

Projects include:

• Utopía Estrella, a transformation of an informal landfill site adjacent to the municipality’s water treatment plant into a community and cultural center focused on ecological education 
• University of the Environment, a sustainable campus with attention to regenerative processes that aims to achieve food self-sufficiency in thirty years, in collaboration with Oscar Hagerman
• Los Pinos Cultural Center, a reprogramming of Mexico’s former presidential residence and offices for public use, including a network of open spaces, a museum, and a pavilion devoted to food culture

CANO VERA arquitectura’s design for Utopía Estrella won the 2023 Gold Holcim Award for Latin America. The practice participated in the Venice Biennale in 2018 and 2016.

Fermín Andrade earned a BArch from the Ibero-American University (IBERO), where he currently teaches.

Juan Carlos Cano is a professor at IBERO. He studied architecture at IBERO and holds a master’s degree in literature theory from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. 

Paloma Vera publishes and lectures widely and is a staff editor at Bitácora and Arquine magazines. She holds a BArch from IBERO.

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