Emptiness in Architecture: Is Silence More Powerful Than Fullness?

A young student at the start of architecture school is asked to design a room and draws everything, an ornamented wall, a complicated ceiling, too much furniture, and from him the book sets out to ask whether the greatest architectural moment is sometimes what we did not put in. It gathers the case for emptiness from the Japanese idea of Ma and the tea house, the concrete and light of Tadao Ando, the vanishing boundaries of SANAA and Kengo Kuma, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, John Pawson’s reductions and Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals, where space has scent, temperature and echo. Fullness gets its hearing too: Robert Venturi’s reply that less is a bore, the Baroque church, Versailles where fullness became politics, the moving voids of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI in Rome, the overload of Times Square and a grandmother’s house crowded with things kept for memory. Between these poles stand the Islamic courtyard and the Alhambra, where dense ornament gathers around water and sky, Central Park as the green void that saved Manhattan, Daniel Libeskind’s void as a wound, the open prayer hall of the mosque and the empty chair of someone gone, and the book finds that hierarchy, more than the number of things, separates richness from chaos. It ends with a question for every architect, what can I remove, and with the advice to ask a space what it needs and give it only that.