Three solutions for furnishing unused spaces "Empty!"
Brief description of the project
The starting point of "Empty!" is Riga from a demographic point of view - Riga's population decline of 30% since the early 1990s has been proportionally the largest among European capitals. But the aim of the paper is not to look at the quantitative changes in the population, but to look at the qualitative characteristics of these changes from a sociological perspective. In a depopulated and de-industrialised city, empty space often becomes a hopeful financial instrument, oriented towards the past and the future, which looks less and less like a living space. "Empty!" invites us to reflect on the human processes that might exist in the unused space of Riga while it naively or hopefully awaits an economically productive future. How can we share space, creating a more multi-layered, qualitative and collaborative everyday experience in the city? The project's author gave three unused spaces in Riga a new use for a few weeks: an unused factory floor at 52 Slokas Street became a gym, an attic at 17 Valdemāra Street became an observation tower, and an empty apartment at 6 Čiekurkalna Street served as a laundry dryer for the building's residents. The project was developed as the author's master's thesis at the Department of Architecture of the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Lausanne.
