Void Capital

Void Capital is a project about the city centre of the European Metropolis. Meeting place and valuable architectural device: The characters of the urban voids define the twofold strategy. Here, the creation of empty space and the densification happen simultaneously. The urban fabric is set in motion; the center becomes lively, inclusive, modern.

Void Capital proposes a template, an open source architectural blueprint for urban densification. Its tools are fundamental typologies of the city’s periphery. They are assembled on the same site, creating ever-new architectural arrangements. Implemented in Paris, the project renegotiates the modernist typologies of: the Grand Ensemble (the Housing District) and the Quartier d’Affaires (the Business District), both once positive icons, now fallen into despair. La Samaritaine, a closed Parisian department store accommodates the two halves. Together, they form the Department City.\nIn the Housing District, the void is seen as a place where people meet. For the citizens, everyday life is shared between two areas: the individual cell and the collective hedonistic retreat. Here, extraordinary metropolitan rituals are performed: A changing repertoire of previously hidden urban practices, can now be shamelessly repeated countless times. The architecture of the Housing District changes substantially only once in a century. \nIn the Business District, the void is seen as a tool which creates infrastructure. The district’s typical plan reflects an adaptable architectural device that evolves through time and various economic contexts. Future scenarios are based on La Samaritaine’s heteroclite transformations, put into perspective by individual site-specific analyses. The architect operates on a normative level: by simply accelerating or decelerating already ongoing urban phenomena. The district is organised in separate operational entities; the “Departments”. Programmatically unstable, the departments provide an architecture of minimal framework, flexible enough to perform unpredictable future uses, such as exciting urban arts, crafts and services. The form of the Business District is being subject to a change on an average pace of twenty years.\nThe Department City is an ephemeral scenario, rather than a finite project. Its blue color suggests conditions, rather than imposing solutions. It is a blueprint that when appropriated, it becomes an architecture about color, and life.