The Empty Room + 100 Rooms

Fragmented Thoughts on Space
RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi)

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— but 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 the 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. What matters most, is the look of it, and the contest to keep that look relevant in the media— as long as possible. It submits itself to a sick competition for visibility. The more awes it creates, the more viral it becomes. What used to be an autonomous discipline and a source of inspiration, stimulation, and motivation now has become the subject of entertainment, speculation, and show business.
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. Where to begin then! Well, as Kahn always said: “Architecture comes from the making of a room”. This book starts with this, the very desire to dwell in a space in its most basic form— a room. Through short passages and aphorisms, this text revisits space as the only protagonist, the very foundation, and the sole essence of architecture. It affects your perception of space, it makes you to look at architecture differently —most likely to see the invisible.

Today architecture has turned into a mere media device at the service of external forces. What used to be an autonomous discipline and a source of inspiration, stimulation, and motivation, now has become the subject of entertainment, speculation, and show business. It has given up its capacity to be a discipline and instead converted to be an industry, a part of commercial establishment. It is my hope that reading through these pages affects the way you perceive the space and hopefully invites you to look at architecture differently —most likely to see the invisible. _RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi)

Many Untold Parables of The Empty Room
RZLBD (Reza Aliabadi)

The Empty Room, in the absence of any visual materials, was a written manifesto composed of RZLBD’s poems and collection of quotes intended to portray the room and the emptiness as the essence of architecture. Now, 100 Rooms complements our own blurry images of the empty room with a visual guide. Each spread consists of a plan and a physical model of a room, which is an excavation of the geometry and order inherent within the square. It holds no design intention — no scale or function — but simply one of infinite possibilities that emerge from a square. This framework suggests that the formal expression of a room comes from within. With these visual references, one can begin to imagine many approximations to the empty room. A line on paper is always less, as Kahn says, but through these measurable means, the immeasurable idea of the empty room will be formed in one’s mind.