HEALING ARCHITECTURES

Healing Architectures: Designing Spaces of Care presents the projects developed in the Spring 2025 Advanced Studio at the Yale School of Architecture, directed by Benedetta Tagliabue and Can Vu Bui, and stems from an investigation into the relationship between architecture and care. Through drawings, models, collages and experimental representations, the exhibition explores the design of a future Kálida Center 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 framework, tracing the history and philosophy of the Maggie’s Centers and highlighting the Kálida Sant Pau Center, designed by Miralles Tagliabue EMBT Architects. This project exemplifies how light, materials, the garden and the domestic scale can generate warm and non-medicalized 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 of respite, encounter and accompaniment inserted in a highly specialized healthcare landscape. Inspired by the values of Maggie’s Centres and reinterpreted from the culture and urban fabric of Barcelona, the proposals propose 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 Fundació Enric Miralles through a conversation between Benedetta Tagliabue, Can Vu Bui, Joan Reventós and Carolina García, which opened a space for shared reflection on the role of architecture in the processes of care and the transformation of hospital environments. This initial dialogue gave way to a program of conversations, conferences and round tables that broadens the scope of the exhibition, bringing together architects, healthcare professionals and oncology specialists to delve into topics such as hospital humanization, 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 city spaces into landscapes of care that attend not only to illness, but to collective well-being and the human experience of inhabiting.