Exhibition: "Healing Architectures" at the Enric Miralles Foundation

Healing Architectures: Designing Spaces of Care presents the projects developed in the Spring 2025 Advanced Studio at the Yale School of Architecture, led by Benedetta Tagliabue and Can Vu Bui, and emerges from research into the relationship between architecture and care. Through drawings, models, collages, and experimental representations, the exhibition explores the design of a future Kàlida Centre on the campus of the Vall d'Hebron Hospital, understanding architecture as a tool capable of accompanying the emotional, social, and physical well-being of people living with cancer.

The exhibition places the students' proposals within a broader context, tracing the history and philosophy of the Maggie's Centres and highlighting the Kálida Sant Pau Centre, designed by Miralles Tagliabue EMBT Architects. This project exemplifies how light, materials, the garden, and the domestic scale can generate warm, non-medicalised environments conceived as welcoming and supportive spaces in constant dialogue with the hospital and the city.

The projects imagine an architecture of care that acts as a threshold between the hospital and the urban environment: a space for respite, meeting, and accompaniment set within a highly specialised healthcare landscape. Inspired by the values of the Maggie's Centres and reinterpreted through the culture and urban fabric of Barcelona, the proposals see architecture not only as a functional response, but as an active agent of comfort, belonging, and healing.

The opening of the exhibition took place at the Enric Miralles Foundation through a conversation between Benedetta Tagliabue, Can Vu Bui, Joan Reventós and Carolina García, who inaugurated a space for shared reflection on the role of architecture in care processes and in the transformation of hospital environments. This initial dialogue gave way to a programme of talks, lectures, and round tables that expands the scope of the exhibition, bringing together architects, healthcare professionals, and oncology specialists to delve into topics such as hospital humanisation, neuroarchitecture, the integration of nature and city, and the urbanism of care.

Conceived as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange, Healing Architectures: Designing Spaces of Care invites us to rethink architecture as a sensitive and committed practice, capable of transforming the city's spaces into landscapes of care that attend not only to illness, but to collective well-being and the human experience of inhabiting.