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.”
