Space-void dichotomy in architecture

Abstract

The article raises the issues of annihilation of places without a direct function in the urban space in the context of the implementation of standards for the development of territories and the desire for their mass replication. In view of the widespread perception of urban wastelands with a negative connotation, the article explores the understanding of the category of void in architectural theory and practice on a positive basis. The differences between the attitude to space as an object in the modernist design method and void as the subject of the modern postmodernist method are described. The properties and values of void are considered in order to return subject-subject relations to void as a value, to clarify its potential for introduction into the project method as a category that has significant axiological properties in comparison with space. Rehabilitating the repressed meaning of void is seen as the key to major professional change. It is proposed to consider void as an integral part of poetic experience and as a manifesto of a new form of architecture.