Conversations: Benedetta Tagliabue and Emily Abruzzo

Emily Abruzzo So, Benedetta, I met you briefly twenty-three years ago when I was a graduate student at Princeton. We had an exchange studio with several schools, and I spent half of a semester at ETSAB, and we visited your studio. It was 2001. I just wanted to say that it’s nice to see you again after all this time. It’s been a lifetime since then.

Benedetta Tagliabue I remember. 2001 seems like just yesterday to me.

Constructs Aside from the fact that you’ve met before, one of the reasons to put you in conversation with each other is your common range of interests and project types. One of the most singular project types you’ve both worked on is spaces for food. How do you approach this type of intimate space, as opposed to other types of architectural project?

BT Food is a fantastic theme. I’ve always loved this possibility to be in touch with markets in Barcelona. The first time I saw La Boqueria, on the Ramblas, I was shocked because it’s an incredible space where you can read the culture of the place through the colors of the products and the relationship with South America, and you can read the climate. A market tells you what is happening in a city. By chance we were invited to do the Santa Caterina market, which is next to our home—and also where we bought our food every day. We cast colorful images of tomatoes and oranges and apples on top of the Santa Caterina market, which is exactly what you can see when you go inside: these colors and shapes that bring with them a reminiscence of flavor. I also taught a course in Paris when Odile Decq was the director, and food was the main theme. We asked the students to work with the city of Paris and look at it from the point of view of food, and the results were fantastic, really fantastic.

EA I think, Benedetta, you’re referring to something that I always love to say: We eat with our eyes before we eat. And your market is an amazing landmark project that we all have referred to over the years. The project that my firm just finished is a combination building; it’s not just for the public. It’s a building where there’s food production every day, and sometimes the public comes in. In our case there’s a challenge of materiality in terms of what’s functional and what’s legal for food production. How do you balance the stainless steel and tile that’s required to meet health codes with something warm and beautiful, with soft lighting for people who are tasting the food or coming to eat with their eyes? One of the biggest challenges is the traditionally separate spaces of food production for those who are making and those who are eating. It’s something that I’m surprised isn’t addressed more in architecture because there is such a celebration of food artistry around the world, and I’m sure we’ll see many projects in the coming years that look at that line and make great strides toward invention.

C Benedetta, you mentioned a project that you gave the students in Paris. Could you tell us a little bit about what you have planned for your Yale students?

BT I had the opportunity to work on a project recently that was a big lesson for me. We were involved in the first Maggie’s Center outside of the United Kingdom. Maggie’s Centers are a very simple idea. When she discovered that she had cancer, Maggie Keswick Jencks went to find a cure in the British hospitals and found that they were curing from the medical point of view but not at all from the human perspective. She started saying, “Okay, I’ll tell you why I don’t feel well in a British hospital. It is because you treat me like a number. You don’t treat me like a person. I’m not able to do anything myself. I’m not autonomous. I don’t have a relationship with the beauty that is so important for me and, as a landscape designer, I have no relationship with nature.” So maybe all these things should happen in a place near a hospital, so that people who have to go for treatment can have access to somewhere nearby where they can go to feel whole—where they can feel at home and feel active. They can make a cup of tea, for example, surrounded by beauty. This is a very simple idea. I discovered through this small project that architecture has an incredible power and that as architects we really need to understand how our tools have so much capacity to make people feel better and heal. So this semester my Yale students will design a Maggie’s Center in Spain.

EA I think the students will be very excited. Maggie’s Centers are a very popular reference project for our students. Spaces of care have been the subject of a conversation we’ve been having at the school for several years now. Last year I cotaught an advanced studio with Kim Holden, who was a founder of SHoP architects and has since become a doula. Our studio focused on spaces for birth outside of hospitals where you don’t feel sick. We were pleasantly surprised by how engaged the students were with this question. One of the things Kim was always talking about was all of this evidence that if you have a calm environment, gardens, and natural lighting, there are better health outcomes. It’s an amazing, underexplored, underfunded building type here, for sure, because everything is so hospital based.

BT This is fantastic to know because I think it’s obvious when you feel well in a space, but it’s not obvious what makes you feel that way. So there needs to be an investigation into the magical formula for well-being.

C What techniques or tactics have you found that that work as part of your own magical formula?

EA We don’t have the breadth of experience that you have, Benedetta. We started our practice more or less around twelve years ago and began with exhibitions and installations. Now we’re working on more public-facing projects. We have a public library in New York that’s starting construction soon, which we’re very excited about. But our projects have really been about form, light, and color more than material selection. It often seems like we’re a materials-based practice, and we are to some degree. But really, we like to use very simple standard materials in a way that’s effective in terms of those three qualities because that’s the way we’ve been able to make the most of the tools used for each project.

BT For us it’s more about finding an equilibrium and harmony, which is not so easy. Each time we have to consider a specific context—our responses would be different for Barcelona and Shanghai—in order to find a harmonious result. We also try as much as possible to introduce a little bit of nature, to bring the exterior indoors. This idea of renaturalizing is very important—it’s a way to introduce something that is instinctively accepted by humans. One of the most beloved strategies is to use wood; it is always kind of alive.

EA I’m sure natural lighting and daylighting is a huge part of those spaces of care, right?

BT Yeah, for sure. I was kind of implying that in the sense of the relation between inside and outside light is fundamental, but it’s also important that you feel you are inside and protected, with a nice climate. You could feel that you are in the garden, but natural light is fundamental.

C One of the assignments Emily gives in her core studios, initiated by M.J. Long, is a daylighting model—a sort of detail section model showing materials and daylight at a large scale—so that students can actually get inside and understand exactly how light will affect the spaces. Recently she’s taken it further and allowed for detail mock-ups and one-to-one material testing.

EA So you can ask the students to make all of those things for your studio next semester.

BT Wow, one-to-one scale! I think it’s beautiful.

EA Do you make models in your office?

BT Yes.

EA For everything, right?

BT Yes, for everything. We very much like model making, also using collage and paper. It is a way to maintain a focus on the material level inside the office. Sometimes architects tend to disappear into the computer.

EA One thing I’ve been wondering is how many offices are still keeping up that level of model production with the rise in remote work since the pandemic. I imagine it probably affects the type of architectural production happening in offices. It seems like people are making fewer models.

BT You’re right. In Spain for the first three months we were ordered to stay home and only factories were open. We could go on quite well with meetings online, we were very productive, but only because we were working on projects that had already started. Whenever we had to start a new project from a distance, we didn’t know how to do it. It is so difficult to be creative at a distance. After we reopened, I asked people not to stay home. We are a small office. We have a very big terrace, and we kept windows open; the climate is very easy, so it was not terribly dangerous. Now we have many possibilities for doing things online, but the creative part is very difficult. This is what we learned from the pandemic: you can still do hybrid work because most of it is project meetings. But the creative part is different—you need to be present. There are many moments where you doubt the work, and maybe you make decisions that are the exact opposite of what sensible. You need to move with this kind of intuition, be open to possibilities, and meet and compare notes with others.

EA What’s always struck me about Yale is the really high level of congeniality, this presence and collaboration and—as far as I can tell, at least among the East Coast schools—the unparalleled studio culture. What I’m excited about is that I think it’s fully back. The studio I teach is an independent research studio, and each has its own topic. I think in a studio like that there could be a moment where people don’t feel like they need to be there physically because they’re not working on the same thing. But actually what we’ve seen is some wonderful cross-pollination.

C I want to ask both of you about the role of place in your work. Benedetta, you mentioned the importance of Barcelona as a figure in your work, and certainly you work internationally in China and Italy as well, but it is striking that you use vaulting, arches, and tile, these Barcelona motifs, quite a lot. And similarly, Emily, your work is very much of New York. I’m thinking of your town house in Greenpoint, which certainly works with the conventions of New York real estate, but you’re pushing against it with your choice of materials while still nodding to the rhythm of the city. How does the urban context affect your work?

EA There’s a belief that architects have an aesthetic they’re interested in pushing forward. For my practice, the idea that we might come to a project with preconceived notions is a little bit uninteresting, and we always learn, listen, and observe to see what ingredients are there for us to work with. I think context is interesting as a question because it’s not only about place; it can be culture, like that of an institution, for example. There are ways we’ve been able to interpret and play with context that continue to be productive without feeling tied to making things look like what already exists.

BT Our practice is incredibly international, but it’s very important for us to have a base in Barcelona—the feeling that we can move very well in the world because we have a strong foundation, a home. I remember this conversation at the beginning of my relationship with Enric Miralles, in 1989, and he doubted me because I am Italian. We met in New York and he asked, “What would you do if you come to Barcelona? Because you’re an Italian architect, and as far as I know, an architect is only able to work in the place where they are from.” Can you imagine? I remember telling him I that disagreed—there are many fantastic architects who have been able to do architecture outside their own country. Afterward we nearly always worked abroad. So the answer was provided by real life, and since Enric passed away in 2000 I’ve gotten work even further away. I was working in China and Czechoslovakia, and now in Albania and France. The first thing we design is always the site plan, with the idea that the project will have influence far beyond the site. But the reverse is also true: whatever happens in the surroundings has an influence on the place where you are working. Emily, as you mentioned about the cultural aspects, we try to put them in our drawings, casting them in collage. Through these crazy collages you get some of the ephemeral characteristics of the place to become physical things, like a drawing.