I read buildings for what they can carry, and where they will fail.

The two lenses

My father lived with dementia. Looking for somewhere he could live, my family visited care homes across northern Italy, and I read every one of them twice: as an architect: layouts, sightlines, light and as a daughter. I have also walked through humane places, many of them in the Netherlands. Some buildings sustain people. Others quietly erase them, politely, with good finishes.

Then, one afternoon in a courtyard, my father caught the eye of a four-year-old on a swing. A look, then a shared, unhurried smile. Nobody had programmed it or funded it. It happened because someone, years earlier, had drawn a courtyard where a child and an old man could simply be in the same place.

That is the whole argument.

Where I have stood

I trained at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, inside Villanueva's Ciudad Universitaria, a UNESCO World Heritage site built on the idea that architecture is a social act before it is anything else. A master's from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya asked what a building actually means to the people inside it.

Since then I have sat on more sides of the table than most architects do. Under the studio of Eduardo Fernando Guillén I helped remodel public hospitals in Cabimas and Maracaibo and assessed thirteen public hospitals across Caracas — buildings that could not close for a day while the brief changed under them. I managed construction for a bank, a telecom operator and museums across Barcelona and Berlin. For two years, as general manager of a manufacturer's Spanish subsidiary, I was accountable for the brief rather than responding to it: P&L, operations, the business behind the building. Since 2017 I have run Space Your Place, where I learned first-hand how much unpaid care a workplace already carries without ever designing for it. I am the founder of Porto Dome.

You cannot resolve a plan until you know who will be disappointed by it. Most briefs never say.

Why I am the one asking the questions

Put me in a room with a CEO, the person cleaning the building at 6am, a data researcher, an anthropologist and a gerontologist, and I will end up in a real conversation with all of them. The work only holds together if someone in the room is curious about every generation and every job title in it, not just the client's.