Fragments of Crafts #Benedetta Tagliabue

The Italian architect Benedetta Tagliabue founded the studio EMBT together with Enric Miralles in 1994. After Miralles’s death in 2000, Tagliabue became director of the studio and was responsible for finishing some of the studio’s most emblematic works, as well as for continuing the legacy of the Catalan architect and, at the same time, leaving his own imprint.

The architecture of Enric Miralles, first together with Carme Pinós and then with Benedetta Tagliabue, is an architecture that develops from the fragment and, therefore, has always been designed down to the last detail of its interior. Despite having created furniture expressly for many projects, such as the nooks in the Scottish Parliament, Miralles never thought of prototypes to be masss-produced, although he did build unique pieces such as the Ines-Table, designed together with Benedetta Tagliabue for their private home.

For us it is very important to reuse things, to live with new and old things and to appreciate their life , Benedetta Tagliabue.

More than 20 years after Miralles’ death, Benedetta Tagliabue has developed her own personal work all over the world that seeks a balance between Miralles’ characteristic fragmented aesthetics, heir to the last Smithsons, and the respect for tradition and craftsmanship. Elements such as the ceramic roof of the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona or the Spanish pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, with its wicker skin, can be interpreted from this balance, but also from the expressive role that materials play.

The same can be said of more current projects such as the recently completed church of San Giacomo in Ferrara or the Kálida Centre in Barcelona, but also of different pieces of furniture that Tagliabue has been designing in recent years, such as the rattan Tina armchair, the wooden tables for The Workshop of Dreams, born from a commission by Martha Thorne, or the Dome lamp, with its late-Gothic ribs.