Casa 720

The circular villa and the circular masterplan have multiple histories across time. Cousins of the perfect square and the ideal quadrangle, the circular building (the tower/the drum/the tempietto/the dome) and the larger circular enclosure (Great Zimbabwe almost a millennium ago; Edwin Lutyens’ faux battlements on Ireland’s Lambay Island; Norman Foster’s Apple HQ; Sou Fujimoto’s Grand Ring for Expo 2025 in Osaka) use this most economical of geometries to both contain program and generate iconic form.

Casa 720 is the latest villa completed by Fernanda Canales in the bucolic countryside near Valle de Bravo, approximately two hours by car from Mexico City. It radiates as a thick ring of accommodation opening directly from a circular patio. Circular buildings can be ostensibly solid, even defensive forms (like John Johansen’s 1960s United States embassy in Dublin). Once one thinks of “villa”, and of that term’s historic associations with ideas of town and city (ville), the ideal circular villa may well consist of a perimeter membrane and a sheltered interior.

In this reading, is the circular villa centripetal, gravitating about a central focus, or centrifugal, disseminating out into the surrounding world?

The new villa’s canopy roof (a Brutalist halo?) shelters many communal and private spaces below. It is also accessed from the patio by a curving staircase to function as an exposed terrace or belvedere. As at the clifftop Casa Malaparte on Capri, the absence of handrails instigates a sense of unease and adventure, encircled by seemingly feral vegetation and a singular rock outcrop whose blunt, autochthonous presence is far from the suburban setting of most contemporary villas.

Here we are surrounded and embraced by a magical natural world: robust topography and geography, untrammeled vegetation and fauna, and a concatenation of slow-moving bodies of water. This...

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