All of the sound and fury of framing, of axial alignment, symmetry and rhythm. All of all the tricks in architecture's arsenal usually used to proclaim significance, then … nothing. Blankness, void, emptiness. A dense nothing, concentrated like a solar mirror into a point exactly where a thing of substance should be. Where you expect something of historical, national, or religious importance there is nada, zilch, zip.

Silence with the volume turned way up, exaggerated because of the fanfare around this absence. Frame without content.




“So take a look at me now” the architecture says “well there's just an empty space”. Just like Phil Collins, it's the initial invitation to look (in Collins’ case, the plea expressed though the song itself, in architecture's case the rhetoric of framing, say, concave niche, surrounding architrave and so on) that creates the drama of absence. 

“Look at this absence” they both say, “See the nothing”. Collins because the emotional pain of romantic loss is, apparently, causing him a psychic sensation of loss of self (dramatised of course by the rhetoric of 80’s pop, the history of romance, and other ideologies of the lexicons of love). The empty niche though. What does its absence represent?

The loss of heartbreak is easy to understand (if not easy to bear) - the unbearable absence of your romantic and/or erotic object of desire. Death (not covered by Collins, at least in this song) brings sensations of mortal loss - of the immaterial humanity of personhood, of the physical presence of the corporeal self all vanished. Architecture of course is happy to engage with death. From the funeral urns that often fill niches, to the graves, statuary, and monuments depicting the deceased that litter our cityscapes. From the pyramids to Adolf Loos’ mound-in-the-forest, one might even argue that architecture has a more active relationship with death than life. All this to say, the empty niche can’t simply be about death (or at least not about death in a simple way).

The blankness of an empty niche is not, say, the same kind of blankness we see in Modernist abstraction. There is no ‘less’ here - the ‘more’ is already in the decorative rhetoric of framing (imagine a Rothko in an elaborate golden baroque frame). The absence is, despite its nothingness, representational. The void is still part of language as much as a pregnant pause is part of our vocal vocab.

Is the void the equivalent of opening your mouth but being unable to speak? Of clearing your throat, taking the stage, breathing deeply, only to remain silent? All of the rhetoric of speech deployed as an overture to the wordlessness of the void. Why go to such lengths to say something if there was nothing to say? 

Or is the empty niche trying to speak unspeakable things? Are its thoughts, ideas, and sensations indescribable by the simple show-and-tell of architecture parlante? Are these sentiments beyond the esoteric codes that underwrite architectural language? Things that you couldn’t translate even armed with a copy of John Summerson’s Language of Classical Architecture.

The absence expressed by the empty niche is mysterious and undeclared. It shows us that something is not there without being clear about what precisely is missing. Or why it is missing. Is it something yet to arrive? Or is it lost?

Does the empty niche suggest an unknown ruination yet to come? That's to say, a way of presenting the present as found piece of archaeology, the contemporary moment as a remnant of a collapsed civilisation. This could make sense given the obsession of the Renaissance with ruins as the origin of its rebirth. (And, say, the huge blank niches of Soane’s Bank of England as elements escaped from Joseph Gandy’s illustration of that very same building proposed building in ruins).





Are they empty spaces created by erasures and redactions? Armatures that remain after the act of dynamited Bamiyan Buddhas, the iconoclastic orgy of destruction that accompanied the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or bronze Edward Colston thrown into the dock.

Or do they suggest incompleteness? A building frozen in an unfinished state, preserving that optimistic potential that building sites often have, that space of imagination still present before its obliterate by the mundanity of the everyday and the disappointments of reality.

Is the emptiness of the niche a product of the architect stepping back as an auteur, ceding the ground of meaning to another agent in a way that renders the building simply a platform for others to fill with content?

Or is it the declaration of the significance of architecture without content. No longer tethered to a specific meaning, can architecture assume a role that transcends the typical purposes of building? Empty niches are entirely without function (even more: they deploy a gloriously perverse anti-functionalism). Not concerned with representing history or events. No longer in the service of a this-means-that narrative as written by state, religion, or power.

Reversing all the conventions of architecture, the empty niche emerges as a great big glowing useless and empty assertion of architecture itself. Emancipated from all those responsibilities, it reveals the vital void within all of that inert heavy substance that is usually described as architecture.

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