Benedetta Miralles Tagliabue

Benedetta Tagliabue (1963-) is an important contemporary Italian architect at the helm of the Spanish studio EMBT. The entire first part of her career follows in the footsteps of the great Catalan architect Enric Miralles (1955-2000), whom she met immediately after his studies at the IUAV in Venice. The professional partnership between the two began in 1991, the year of the breakup between Miralles and his previous partner Carme Pinós, also an architect with a strong artistic personality; in 1994 Benedetta became an equal partner in the studio, which then took the name EMBT from the initials of the two spouses. Her contribution to Miralles's works is the subject of debate among scholars, but there is no doubt that from the beginning of their collaboration there was a strong change in his style, which veered towards a sensitivity to colours and materials that was new to him, as well as starting to prefer more welcoming forms. After Miralles’ premature death at the age of twenty-four, Benedetta Tagliabue continued to carry forward the important projects still under construction, including the redevelopment of the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona (1997-2004) and the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh (1999-2004). In the following decades, the studio’s projects were then entirely followed by her in person, leading her to reveal a versatile and anti-intellectualistic spirit, very skilled at foregrounding the human figure and its relationship with space: characteristics that can be found in highly successful projects such as the Spanish pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo or the National Maritime Museum in Tianjin (2012). In the field of product design, her activity focuses above all on the lighting sector thanks to collaborations with brands such as Bover, Artemide and Firmamento Milano.