In the late '90s, Eliashberg and Thurston established a remarkable connection between foliations and contact structures in dimension three: any co-oriented, aspherical foliation on a closed, oriented 3-manifold can be approximated by both positive and negative contact structures. Additionally, if the foliation is taut then its contact approximations are tight.

In this talk, I will present a converse result concerning the construction of taut foliations from suitable pairs of contact structures. The proof involves a generalization of a result of Burago and Ivanov which might be of independent interest in dynamical systems.