Los Manantiales Restaurant

Félix Candela was already Mexico’s busiest shell-builder in 1958 when the engineer and restaurateur Joaquín Álvarez Ordóñez commissioned a new dining room beside the chinampa canals of Xochimilco, replacing a wooden restaurant on the same site. Candela drew four hyperbolic-paraboloid shells intersecting on a circular plan, their curved edges free of any perimeter beam, so the whole roof reads as an eight-pointed flower resting on a single ring of glazing at ground level; the concrete itself is only about four centimetres thick, reinforced with a fine steel mesh. Some official records list Álvarez Ordóñez as architect of record, but Candela’s own account of the design, and the architectural literature since, treat the shell as entirely his — usually cited as his most complete built statement of the geometry he spent a career refining. The 2017 Puebla earthquake cracked the shell badly; a federal reconstruction programme with UNAM’s Instituto de Ingeniería repaired roughly a kilometre of cracking and rebuilt two damaged vault segments, completed in 2024.