Void Space: How Subtraction Defines the Architecture of Lyon

From the expansive Parc de la Tête d’Or to Place Bellecour square, Lyon’s urban fabric is characterized by openings and thoroughfares.

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Space gives architecture definition. Few cities showcase this idea like Lyon, France. Located in the country’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, France’s third-largest city has become a major center for banking and start-ups. From the expansive Parc de la Tête d’Or to Place Bellecour square, Lyon’s urban fabric is characterized by openings and thoroughfares. Today, the city’s contemporary architecture emphasizes this condition through subtraction. Building volumes are increasingly designed around expressive and functional voids, negative spaces that shape daily life. Captured by both fenestration and massing, these spaces center on human experience.

Showcasing Lyon and its approach to subtraction, we’ve gathered together the following commercial and cultural projects across the city. Exploring the relationships between program and envelope, sequence and boundary, they represent a dynamic design culture. Each combines negative space with vivid colors, rhythmic structure and diverse scales. The designs embrace context while reinterpreting it, providing new frameworks for life to unfold.

Le Monolithe MGA by MANUELLE GAUTRAND ARCHITECTURE, Lyon, France

Le Monolithe was designed as part of a larger, five-part development in Lyon. Formed around sustainable and energy-efficient office design strategies, the project is juxtaposed by different programs and rental housing within a simple, rectilinear form.

The Extension of the Perrache-Confluence Substation by Rue Royale Architectes, Lyon, France

The Perrache-Confluence Substation extension explores ideas of disappearance and negative space. The project focused on the renovation and extension of the substation through a metallic skin, gabions and a bamboo forest.

Euronews Television Headquarters by Jakob + MacFarlane, Lyon, France

Jakob + MacFarlane’s Euronews project was designed as a stretched cube pierced by two conical atriums. Created to reconcile formal innovation and sustainable development, the design aimed to show how an office program could be transformed into an experimental form of architectural creation.

Bridge of Peace by Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes, Lyon, France

The Bridge of Peace was made for pedestrians and cyclists over the Rhone in Lyon. Designed to reveal the landscape and urban morphology, the slender structure links the conference center “Cité Internationale” and the district of St. Clair to two major parks on each side of the river.

GL Events Headquarters by Studio Odile Decq, Lyon, France

Odile Decq’s GL Events Headquarters was designed around aerial steel structures between the Rhone and the Saône. Two parallelepiped building volumes combine with four façades that explore opacity, representation and transparency.

Musée des Confluences by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Lyon, France

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Musée de Confluence was made as a natural history museum with a geometric form shaped by the turbulent flow of the two bodies of water around it. Sweeping angles, forms and voids feature grandiose vertical spaces and connections across several exhibition halls.

© VIGUIER architecture urbanisme paysage

Leisure Center Lyon Confluence by Jean Paul Viguier et Associés, Architecture – Urbanisme, Lyon, France

Located on a promontory between the Saône and Rhône rivers, this leisure center is sited in the Confluence area of Lyon. The designed was formed to reinterpret conventional shopping mall design through multiple programs housed underneath a sweeping roof and open terraces.

The Orange Cube by Jakob + MacFarlane, Lyon, France

Developed in the old harbor zone of Lyon, the Orange Cube was made to bring together commercial and cultural program. Formally, a giant hole was carved into the brightly colored cube to respond to views, air and light.

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Author: Eric Baldwin

Based in New York City, Eric was trained in both architecture and communications. As Director of Communications at Sasaki, he has a background spanning media, academia, and practice. He's deeply committed to trying as many restaurants as possible in NYC.