The architecture of Benedetta Tagliabue listens, observes and transforms spaces with sensitivity. From her studio EMBT, founded in Barcelona together with the late architect Enric Miralles, she has developed a body of work deeply rooted in context—where matter, memory and movement intertwine to shape places with soul.
Her trajectory is marked by a narrative and organic approach to architecture, one that challenges the limits of conventional geometry while embracing the complexity of the urban, cultural and human landscape. Projects such as the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Shanghai, the Santa Caterina Market, the Gas Natural Fenosa Headquarters, the Diagonal Mar Park and the Kálida Sant Pau Centre in Barcelona, as well as the Spanish Pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (winner of the prestigious RIBA Best International Building Award in 2011), or the recent Centro Direzionale station in Naples, reveal a constant search for identity through form, light and materials.
Tagliabue conceives each project as an open dialogue between architecture and landscape, tradition and contemporaneity, technique and emotion. In her hands, wood, brick, steel and ceramic acquire an expressive language that transcends function to become experience. Her spaces invite movement, connection and contemplation.
Under her leadership, EMBT maintains a multidisciplinary and international outlook, with offices in Barcelona, Paris and Shanghai, and a team committed to sustainability, innovation and the social dimension of architecture. Her work has received numerous international awards and has been exhibited in leading institutions such as the MoMA in New York, the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Centre Pompidou.
In parallel with her professional practice, she teaches in schools and universities around the world. She is a visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University and ETSAB in Barcelona, and frequently lectures at leading architecture forums and institutions. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University (Scotland).
Benedetta Tagliabue represents a way of practicing architecture that does not seek protagonism, but permanence; that does not aim to impose itself on a place, but to reveal it. An architecture to be lived, to be adapted, to breathe.