I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a place being vacant
and being empty. Thanks to an interesting
conversation with a colleague on the landscape architecture faculty in
Blacksburg, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that there’s no such thing
as an empty place, an empty site. There are only momentarily vacant sites.
My doubts about the existence of emptiness have been brewing
for a while. As a studio professor, I
sometimes write a project brief framed as a program in search of a site, so I send
students off to find sites. They know
what type of building they’ll be designing but not where. I want them to look for a space in search of
a building, something that will make a space into a place. I have sent many students off through the streets of Old
Town or parts of Washington with the charge to find an "empty" site. Without fail, there’s always at least one who
challenges the conventional definition of empty. One year a student found an existing rowhouse
that had been gutted by fire and made the persuasive argument that the site was
“as if” empty. Another found a building that was dwarfed by its blockmates and
was therefore marked for more mass. If a building is doomed to be redeveloped does that make its site de facto empty? Or just latently vacant?
Occasionally, but often enough to indicate a problem, I will
see an architecture student come back from a site search saying they have
found a perfect site—there's "nothing" on it, it's wooded,
sloping to a creek, for example—They’ll show it to me on Google Earth, and I have
to tell them, that’s not empty, that’s Rock Creek Park; it’s a national park,
you know, like Yosemite. And it is so not empty....not even vacant. It’s not a good thing for
professional collaboration that architects occasionally see landscapes as
empty. (Interestingly, I’ve never had a
landscape student choose a site with a building on it and claim it’s empty
because it has no trees.)
Sometimes I’ve proposed sites that had buildings on them,
buildings that I knew would be demolished if development patterns
continued. So we pretend in
those circumstances that the site is empty, spinning narratives to justify our
dismissal of a building standing irrefutably before us, burned,
undersized, or unfashionable. While all of us in the magic circle of
studio know that erasing the footprint from a drawing or deleting it from the
digital documents doesn’t actually obliterate the real building, like it would
in some Twilight Zone plot, it’s
still very hard to imagine a building gone. The older the building the harder it is. There's nothing like a look at Sanborn maps to fill places that might have looked empty--here was a blacksmith, and a stable--and soon there's a pile of stories and memories occupying Lot 347. Momentarily vacant, but not empty.
To name a place empty is to devalue what’s there, to pass
over it without seeing it. I suppose I
habitually devalue exchange-value when I let students choose parking lots as empty sites. To some, a parking lot isn't empty; it's full of cars and money. The historic preservation movement was a
sustained effort to recalibrate a systematic devaluing of old things, refuting once and for all that a site with an old
building could be considered empty.
Emptiness is culturally constructed; it’s very different
from vacancy, which connotes temporariness.
Buildings can be vacant, then filled, then vacant again...over and over.
Vacancy
is material while emptiness is existential.
People and their stuff can move in and out, but they always leave trace
elements behind in the form of memories.
In architecture, landscape, and especially urban design we have to
remember that the clean slate is a myth:
all is palimpsest.
