"A Glossary of Urban Voids" Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

A Glossary of Urban Voids is a critiqued collection of over 200 terms regularly used to name the urban void, from the "terrain vague" to the "buffer zone," as the means to explore the role of urban voids as public space. As the landscape architect James Corner has pointed out, a void cannot be labeled because “to name it is to claim it in some way.” By listing existing terms, A Glossary of Urban Voids is an attempt to name the unnamable, to define that which should have no precise definition. 

Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect whose work explores voids as socio-spatial phenomena of freedom, diversity, and spontaneity. He is the director of Holes of Matter, a design studio whose mission is to imagine voids in patterns to redefine relations between individual and collective forms of life.  Lopez-Pineiro is the author of the volume A Glossary of Urban Voids (Berlin: Jovis, 2020). His projects and texts have been published internationally by a+t, MAS Context, Bracket, arq: Architecture Research Quarterly, Places, 2G, and others, and his work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and MacDowell. 

Lopez-Pineiro is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars on architecture and landscape with a focus on the public nature of the built environment. He has previously held the 2006-07 Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and the 2014-15 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University. Lopez-Pineiro is a licensed architect in Spain. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize.