100 Rooms (Many Untold Parables of the Empty Room)

As a sequel to The Empty Room: Fragmented thoughts on Space (Actar, 2020), this book by Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD) elaborates the same theme with one hundred iterations of a square room, each of which tells a different story of the emptiness between the walls.

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.