The Empty Room

Part aphorism and part manifesto, this book by Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD) references his ideas and thoughts about space. He suggests ‘the empty room’ as the very essence of architecture, and ‘the spatial experience’ as its highest mandate. Reza revisits architecture – not as the walls that enclose the space – rather the space in-between the walls. What he calls an “anti-architecture” of invisible voids. Today architecture has fallen short as a discipline and has instead converted into an industry, part of commercial establishment. Accordingly it has given up its capacity to offer contributions and has been reduced to being a service. It has become all about a form-making exercise and dressing it up with a fashionable skin. Now, it is necessary or rather urgent to pause, take a moment, go inward, search for the essentials, and hope to rediscover a principle which is at once basic and timeless.