Railroad and the City – Transforming the railway corridor into a new city landscape, 2012-2013 Part 2 Project 2013 Milica Andric University of Belgrade | Serbia This project investigates both the meaning of emptiness in architecture and the way to create an improvement in understanding emptiness not as useless space but as the essential element in architecture. The main focus of this project is on perception of emptiness, defining the boundaries and building’s connection with unoccupied space. The project is located on the Danube riverside in Belgrade. What is particularly interesting for this context is a railroad that creates empty, unoccupied space on the riverside. The project proposes a structure that would mark the line between two different systems and spaces. It would represent an interface between highly urban part of Belgrade and the empty riverside. In such context where two opposites meet, the structure is created. At the same time this structure defines, excludes, limits and marks but also consumes and connects. All public spaces and cultural programs have been infiltrated into the structure leaving the flat riverside empty. This structure spreads between the city and the riverside and has capacity for adaptation so this architecture as volume continues to response to a new change. Activities inside the structure depend on activities in spaces it connects to. Architecture as volume presents reflection of the city while architecture as a flat surface reflection of emptiness. Architecture as surface is the product of reverse logic where we restrain from architecture and instead of projecting onto the empty riverside we reject it, leaving void space. That space is defined only by users and the effect they have on it. With vertical structure that creates a boundary and flat surface this project is aiming to reconsider the typology of public spaces but what is more important to change the building’s connection with existing emptiness. Not to fill the emptiness but to highlight it and to create different scenarios of how it can be used. The emptiness in architecture in this way becomes an extra space that has ability to change and transform. Tutor(s) Nebojša Fotiric