Tatiana Bilbao (Mexico City, 1972) has spent two decades creating an architecture that doesn’t begin with form, but with the question of who’s allowed the space to be themselves. From a monastery in Brandenburg to an aquarium on the Mexican coast, from social housing to a cable-car line for the edges of Mexico City – it always comes back to what she calls ‘the Other’, a notion she traces back to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Ahead of her lecture on 13 October at Brussels’s Bozar, Bilbao reflects on intuition, concrete in the desert, freedom as luxury, and an architecture that seeks to be re-written by those who inhabit it.

Dominique Pieters (A+) – Your thoughts are always in motion – an idea can arrive while you’re holding your daughter’s hand, or during a phone call about something else entirely. Is this way of working something you can pass on to your students, or is it just who you are?