In Praise of Emptiness
We live in a world of full. Full optional, full time, fully booked. But is this really an achievement or a subtle kind of condemnation? In our collective obsession with filling every centimetre, physical or mental, we’ve forgotten what it means to leave space. Yet emptiness isn’t a design flaw: it’s a conscious choice.
In architecture, emptiness is the pause that allows the eye to move, the body to breathe, and the mind to think. Outside of architecture, emptiness is the condition of possibility for anything to exist. Think of music: without rests and silences, there would be no melodies, only indistinct cacophonies.
And yes, we know: this isn’t the classic article you skim between one meeting and the next. This is more of an invitation. In the next few paragraphs, we’ll walk together through this undefined space with four different insights – from art to philosophy, music to the sense of care – to discover that emptiness, perhaps, is fuller than we imagine. As Isabella Ducoli, Head of Design at Altis, says: “In architecture, emptiness is not absence: it’s possibility. It’s the only space you don’t have to fill, but that asks to be traversed.”
1. Rachel Whiteread: sculpting the invisible
Rachel Whiteread, a British artist, has quite literally transformed emptiness into matter. Her works are casts of empty spaces: she fills with resin or concrete the places that usually remain invisible – the inside of a house, a bathtub, a bookshelf – giving us back their negative space as sculpture. As if to say that emptiness is a reversed fullness. A fullness that speaks of who was there, what it contained, of entire lives moving within those volumes. Because without emptiness, no space would ever truly be habitable: we couldn’t cross it, live in it, or act within it.
2. Gordon Matta-Clark: cutting to reveal
Then there is Gordon Matta-Clark, the American architect and artist of the Seventies, famous for his radical cuts into abandoned buildings. He would slice through walls to reveal their interior, creating huge architectural wounds that became new spaces of light and experience. For Matta-Clark, emptiness was a political gesture: it revealed what was inside, laying bare the essence of things, and of ourselves. As Isabella Ducoli comments: “Emptiness is an active field. It’s what happens when you remove the superfluous and leave only space for what matters.”
3. John Cage: the sound of silence
But you don’t need to get your hands dirty with concrete or wield a circular saw to understand emptiness. John Cage, an American composer, taught us that silence is also full of sound. In 1952 he composed 4’33”, a piece where the performer plays no notes. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of apparent silence in which, in reality, you hear everything: coughing, chairs creaking, rain on the roof, the breathing of those in the room. Cage reminds us that emptiness is always full of something, you just need to know how to listen.
4. The Altis perspective: emptiness as care
If everything around us is oversaturated, emptiness becomes a radical act of care. Emptiness as digital detox, as mental space, as a design choice that renounces the superfluous to leave what truly matters: air, light, breath. It’s the square between buildings, not just an urban interstice but a place of encounter and sociality. It’s the clearing in a sacred forest which, in Shinto traditions, becomes a frame for the divine, a sacred space precisely because it is empty. It’s the Zen garden, offering nothing superfluous except its own essentiality, becoming a metaphor for contemplation and meditation.
To speak of emptiness as care means recognising we don’t need to fill every space to make it exist. On the contrary, emptiness is a reservoir of possibility, the field of all potential transformation. And above all, as Isabella tells us: “Emptiness is the last remaining luxury: a space you don’t need to justify, that exists to help you exist better.”
Chairs: a semi-serious anatomy of a design choice
Chairs are a strange kind of mirror. We sit on them for hours, we lean back, we grip their arms. Yet if we observe them closely, they reveal more than we think. They show us how we inhabit space, how we work, how we think. Bruno Munari once said, “Designing a chair means designing the body that will use it.” It wasn’t just a statement about industrial design, but an invitation to realise that every chair shapes the person sitting on it: it imposes postures, suggests durations, sets distances and degrees of intimacy.
We believe every gesture is an act of design, even choosing what to sit on. Observing chairs means reading our own cultural posture. That’s why we’ve created this small (semi-serious but methodical) map through design history and the psychology of inhabiting.
1. Bruno Munari’s “visite brevi o brevissime” chair
Munari designed it in 1945 as a conceptual provocation. An iron seat tilted forward, suspicious and slightly uncomfortable, intended for “very short visits”: the guest sits down but never relaxes, in fact, they slowly slide off. Needless to say, visits don’t last long. A design object can also be a psychological statement and social critique. This is the chair of someone who works with surgical efficiency: a minute longer would become an applied psychology session. If it could speak, it would say: “The exit is that way.”
2. Verner Panton’s Panton Chair
Designed in 1960 and mass-produced from 1967, it was the first chair made entirely from a single piece of moulded plastic. A pop icon of 1960s Danish design, it combined sculptural form with function, its S-shaped silhouette revolutionising the aesthetics of seating. This is the chair with the supple posture of someone who adapts to any change, but always with style. Today it sits in MoMA New York as a masterpiece of organic, industrial design. If it could speak, it would say: “I bend, but I don’t break.”
3. The Eames Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames
Designed in 1956, it is the most iconic lounge chair in the world. Moulded wood, black leather, a posture that’s relaxed yet innately superior. Created to offer “the warmth and comfort of a well-worn baseball glove,” today it’s the throne of anyone who owns at least three volumes of critical theory and can quote Rem Koolhaas by heart – always with a gin and tonic within reach. If it could speak, it would say: “I’m working, even when I look like I’m on a break.”
4. The Aeron Chair by Herman Miller
Designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1994, the Aeron Chair is the queen of contemporary ergonomics. Made of breathable mesh with no unnecessary padding, it offers infinite adjustments and has become a symbol of global smart working and tech office aesthetics. If it could speak, it would say: “My back comes first.”
Because chairs speak, too
Every chair is a personal manifesto: of power, comfort, or style. Observing it methodically, as we do with workspaces, means understanding who we are and who we want to be. In the end, that’s what design is about: interpreting details to create environments that truly reflect us. And this is where the Altis method comes in: analysing every choice, even the most seemingly banal, and transforming it into a conscious gesture aligned with how we live.
Emotions at Work: Not a Soft Skill
Emotions are everywhere. In involuntary gestures, in the tone of an email, in the glances exchanged during meetings. Yet when it comes to work, emotions remain confined to the realm of soft skills. Empathy, emotional intelligence, stress management. Beautiful words, all too often reduced to footnotes in a list of individual performance metrics.
But what if we were witnessing a shift, and what if the way we feel became an integral part of the way we work? This question doesn’t come from philosophy, but from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and organisational anthropology. Fields that tell us, clearly, that emotion and cognition are one and the same: without the first, the second does not exist.
Emotional Based Working
At Altis, we call it EBW: Emotional Based Working. It isn’t a pre-packaged model, but an exploratory field we are mapping through our Proprietary Research. It arises from the evidence that no space, process, or company culture can truly work unless it considers the emotional dimension as a strategic resource.
Is it the opposite of ABW? No, it’s its complement. While Activity Based Working organises spaces and time around what we do, Emotional Based Working organises them around how we feel. Together, they describe work as it really is: a complex system of activities, relationships, emotional states, physical postures, and cultural narratives.
Why emotions really matter
Emotions are what allow us to make quick decisions, assess risks, create connections, and design with meaning. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote it decades ago: “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”
Designing for emotions means creating spaces that are beautiful and functional, but above all able to activate emotional states coherent with the processes they support. It means recognising that a certain type of light, temperature, noise, or spatial arrangement can trigger irritation or creativity, fatigue or focus.
From activity to emotion: the next frontier
In our latest editorial exploration, we asked ourselves: is ABW still the best model? The answer emerged clearly: we don’t think it’s enough. On its own, it’s insufficient to grasp the complexity of contemporary work. To do so, we need to take a step forward – because it’s not only activities that define work, but also the emotions that drive, sustain, and transform them. And that is the true raw material of human work.
