Simone Capra, a founding partner of STARTT (Studio di Architettura e Trasformazioni Territoriali) and an architecture instructor for the College of Design Rome Program, will present “Void Is Not Exactly Empty” as part of the Department of Architecture’s 2023-2024 Public Programs series, “Of the Land.”

“A void lot is not just a portion of land; in some way it’s the witness of the survival of a previous organization of the city and its territory,” Capra says. “In the city, the void space is not only the leftover of the building process. The void is the space of sociability and possibly the “chest” of urban stratification. We design volumes, but we breathe in the void space.”

In this free public lecture, Capra will present STARTT’s projects and design strategies around the concept of void space within the dense urban conditions of Italian cities.

About the speaker

Capra graduated with honors in architecture from the University of Roma Tre and received his PhD in architecture from the IUAV University Institute, Villard D’Honnecourt International Doctoral School. In 2011 he founded STARTT, a Rome-based architecture, urban design and preservation practice, where he is responsible for research and project development during the definition of the idea and for competitions. He presents the studio’s theoretical research at international conferences, workshops and seminars.

Capra has taught architectural design for the College of Design Rome Program since 2015 and has been a landscape architecture advisor for the American Academy in Rome since 2016. For the past year he also has served as a lecturer at TU Wien, Vienna University of Technology.