Emptiness in the Forbidden City Part 2 Project 2025 Alexandra-Clara Popescu University of Westminster London | UK This project reimagines the emptiness in Bucharest's Palace of Parliament site and honours the ghost of Uranus - a once-vibrant community erased by authoritarian power under Ceausescu's communist regime. The proposal works with the site’s physical and psychological emptiness to reclaim ruins and resilient practices, using the archive and memory as a design tool; ethnographic interviews, personal records and historical film to reconstruct erased relationships between people, space and time. A sensitive design language frames and reveals, rather than imposing anew, allowing land and time to lead the spatial experience while uncovering the poetics of archaeological space above and below ground. Based on lost street networks, follies offer vertical farming pockets and gardens, flexible trading spaces and hybrid agricultural and educational spaces.The lost patterns of Uranus’s community life are reinterpreted through the adaptive self-building of present-day ‘ordinary heroes’; the current Roma inhabitants of the surrounding area, with self-built interventions rooted in vernacular craft and hybrid connections for a new, more accessible era of the Forbidden City. By learning from both Uranus’s past and Bucharest’s present ordinary heroes, the project resists the declaration of erasure, historical amnesia, and the placelessness of capitalist greed, building a new generation of Bucharest’s keepers. Tutor(s)