Studio Visit: Casanova + Hernandez Architects
Studio Visits, instigated by Het Nieuwe Instituut, is a series of evenings dedicated to contemporary architectural practice, its challenges and its possibilities. The series invites professionals, students and the broader public to cross the threshold and take a peek into the architect's workplace. This evening, Casanova + Hernandez Architects will open their doors.
15 June 2018 17:00 - 19:30
ArchiNed publishes a series of articles that builds on the Studio Visits. Read the article The Lessons of the Crisis: the Architect as Foreigner, based on a conversation between Andrea Prins and Helena Casanova.
Casanova+Hernandez
In this studio visit, the co-founders of Casanova + Hernandez will reflect on their practice on the basis of their latest work. Projects such as the requalification of Lake Shkodra's western coast will illustrate the studio's multidisciplinary approach. This is characterized by a strong desire to introduce broader-than-usual perspectives that go beyond the initial design brief. Hence the master plan developed for Lake Shkodra in Albania includes a museum, a visitor centre, several public spaces plus landscape interventions.
The studio is known for developing projects that act as 'urban acupuncture': small interventions that are independent yet coordinated help to regenerate urban public space and city life. For Casanova + Hernandez, thinking strategically about how large areas function is essential in order to discover and strengthen the potential of, and existing synergies between, different points of the city or the natural environment. Casanova + Hernandez develops projects internationally in widely diverging cultural contexts and on a broad range of scales, from architecture and urban planning to landscape architecture.
Studio founders Helena Casanova and Jesus Hernandez moved from Madrid to the Netherlands in 2000, working independently of each other at architecture firms including Neutelings Riedijk Architects, Claus & Kaan and West 8. After winning Europan 6 in 2001, they established their office in Rotterdam.
Studio Visits
Hosted and curated by an architectural studio in collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut, each evening will be organized around a tour, a presentation, an open conversation and a celebration. The gathering will serve as a catalyst for debate and architectural discourse, for strategizing urban policies and actions, for collaboration, forms of solidarity, and friendship as well as competition, and for - why not? - architectural gossip. Studio Visits is also a space in which to reformulate the social position of the architect in a fundamentally changed field of influence, by collectively exploring possible roles and responsibilities.
This first series of visits will be hosted by studios with diverse spatial configurations, forms of practice and portfolios, including Powerhouse Company, Casanova+Hernandez, and LOLA Landscape Architects.
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