100 Rooms: Many Untold Parables of the Empty Room

By Reza Aliabadi

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Actar
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781638401469

Reza Aliabadi

Reza Aliabadi (born 1974), known as RZLBD, is a Canadian artist and architect of Persian origin. He is the founder and principal of Atelier RZLBD; an art & architecture practice based in Toronto, named after a pseudonym he adapted that reflects his interest in abstraction and reduction. His repertoire of work extends to making arts, crafting objects, designing buildings, curating installations, and publishing a zine called rzlbdPOST. From a 17mm wedding ring to a 56km long housing proposal, his portfolio has been distinguished with numerous accolades; exhibited in many venues; and celebrated in more than one hundred print publications. In 2017 RZLBD has been selected among the top emerging design talents in Canada. In the same year the first monograph, RZLBD Hopscotch, was published by UK-based Artifice; it recognizes RZLBD selected built projects by collecting essays, project profiles, and annotated drawings. In 2020, Actar published a pocket-sized manifesto written by RZLBD entitled, The Empty Room; the book intends to portray the room and the emptiness as the essence of architecture. Starting 2023 he is named the first Vignelli Center Designer in Residence, and at the moment he divides his time between Toronto ON & Rochester NY.

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