Emptiness In The Forbidden City: A Project That Works In Unison With The Site’s Emptiness To Reclaim Ruins And Forgotten Practices, Using The Archive As A Design Tool | Masters Thesis On Speculative Architecture

Site Context

Site of Urban Totalitarian Erasure: The proposal is located on the grounds of the Palace of Parliament in central Bucharest. At its core lies the former neighborhood of Uranus — a once-distinctive and organically integrated area of the city that was almost completely demolished, along with its topographical features to make room for the principal cornerstones of Civic Centre.

This development was part of then-Communist leader Ceausescu’s broader vision of urban standardization for Romania. In the process, over 40,000 residents were displaced from their ancestral homes and relocated to standardized apartment blocks, effectively erasing an entire community and replacing it with a fabricated urban landscape rooted in political ideology.

Design Process

Archive as Witness: The design process positions the archive not just as a tool, but as an active witness. Through photographs, interviews, films, drawings, and fragments, a fragmented narrative of the erased Uranus community is reassembled. These archival materials reveal acts of forced removal and concealment — most strikingly embodied in the “Moving of the Churches,” where Bucharest monasteries were shifted on rails and hidden behind concrete facades. In contrast, this proposal fosters openness, reclamation, and resilience.

Re-reading the Ruin: Drawing on Piranesi and Gandy, the site is reimagined through layers of urban memory and the poetics of ruin. The Palace is stripped to its structural bone, while street networks are rebuilt from interview testimonies. The ingenuity of the current Roma residents informs a material strategy based on reuse, hybrid craft, and informal self-building practices. Through physical models, the project explores the interplay between the buried hill, the palace’s exposed bone, and today’s living scenario — allowing multiple temporalities to coexist.

Final Outcome

Typologies of Renewal: The final design employs an archaeological language, with typologies of voids, traces, follies, urban anchors and emptiness, mapped onto lost streets. Rather than dominating, these elements integrate with the site’s absence, creating space for reflection and renewal. Community life is rekindled through Roma-inspired vernacular architecture and subtle ground interventions across the palace: flexible trading spaces, hybrid lodging, and vertical farming pockets. A suspended landscape recalls the destroyed topography, creating a bridge between Romania’s agrarian heritage and the Roma community’s trade-based culture.

Presence Through Absence: The thesis embraces architecture as a tool for spatial remembrance, transforming design into an act of care that interweaves past, present, and future. Instead of reconstructing the erased fabric of Uranus, the project uncovers a poetics of presence through absence, where voids, traces, and semi-open typologies serve as quiet yet powerful reminders of what once existed. Above ground, suspended landscapes and hybrid farming structures frame long-erased farming practices, while below, the layered poetics of archaeological space are gradually revealed.

The Archive as a Living Tool: Collectively, these spaces cultivate a new generation of Bucharest’s keepers, empowering residents to become stewards of their own layered histories. By honoring both the displaced community of Uranus and the Roma inhabitants who now inhabit its remnants, the archive transforms into a living, evolving instrument of urban healing. Here, memory is not preserved as static history but becomes an active force for renewal, dialogue, and resilience in shaping Bucharest’s future.

Conclusion: Ultimately, the project uses memory, archive, and community to heal the fractured urban landscape of Bucharest. It honors erased histories and embraces informal practices, proposing a future rooted in care, continuity, and collective stewardship, rather than rebuilding lost aspects.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]