Where the Soul Feels at Home: Insights from a discussion with Benedetta Tagliabue
By Ana-Maria Banu & Silvia Juliana Rueda Guerrero - Earth Architecture Course
During the final weeks of our course, we met Benedetta Tagliabue. She arrived in the room with warm and colorful energy and began her lecture by welcoming us to her home, a restored old building in Barcelona.
“We discovered that this ruin could be transformed by accepting and by discovering what this house had to give us. We found old walls with Gothic remains, and we decided that they would stay with us, to let the other generations have a conversation with us.”
Architecture shaped by place and people
She made us her guests, leaving us with a profound reflection on the relationship a project can have with ruins and the existing, a theme we are meant to explore. We moved through Santa Caterina Market and the Clichy–Montfermeil Metro Station, and had the opportunity to learn how people’s thoughts, heritage, their way of living, the specific colors of the place, or even how the sky looks – as seen in the Renewal of Century Square in East Nanjing Road – are the elements that guide the project and give it its identity.
Many of the projects begin in the same way: with a careful look at the place from which the project is about to emerge. The process of mixing and understanding its colors, its smells, the way the landscape looks or how it is lived, is the project’s point zero. A primarily intuitive approach, as Benedetta described it, and at its core lies the collage as a main instrument, one that often reveals unexpected aspects of a place, which later find their way into the architecture.
Detail, more than a thought
Throughout this walkthrough of the work from EMBT, the element that makes architecture real is found in the detail: “it’s making everything more real, more acceptable, part of the earth.” In this sense, their projects share a common concern for the human scale, aiming to create places meant to be lived. In the thinking behind Parco del Mare in Rimini, an important part is the ceramic pavement, designed differently so as to create identifiable areas: “in a long line you can get lost, but if you look at the pavement you can say «ah, we are in the yellow part, or in the blue part», and you can recognize where you are.” Within detail, you can find incredible themes; the entire project can reside there, through variations of color or texture.
The power of architecture to make people feel
As we were seeing these projects through photographs, we could comprehend their common purpose from a statement made while talking about Kálida Sant Pau Centre, the strongest insight from this experience:
“We as architects have to provide spaces where the soul is feeling at home, where you can feel healed, where you can feel better, where you have the possibility to forget about the difficulties of life and that there is a sort of harmony around.”