The aim of this manifest is to approach the idea of emptiness and to describe how we define this nothingness which cannot be described as either not existing nor as existing. What interests us most is to rehabilitate this complex and make it habitable while maintaining the essence of emptiness that remains within this place. We believe it is important to first analyze some of the actual definitions before creating our own. So what is exactly the emptiness? It is the estate of containing nothing physical, it is the void drawn, created between two or more physical bodies. How does this void materialize? How could we draw its limit? Do we need to define its limits in order for emptiness to exist? What does the void transmit? Is the weight of the void perceptible for us or can the emotions get projected in it?

As a photographer trying to capture the emptiness, Simone Bossi talks about trying to reveal what she is feeling but not yet being able to define it, as she gets closer and closer to its essence. She also manifests that if the space is the void, it's through its absence that we can intensify its presence. As a sculptor who aims to model and embrace the emptiness, Eduardo Chillida compares the space generated that lives within its form, to breathing, and its movement of swelling and contracting the form, that opens its space, inaccessible and hidden from the outside world. He does not see it as something abstract but as a reality as solid as the volume enwrapping it up.

Emptiness is understood as an active entity, which establishes a dialogue between spaces and the user's bodies. Emptiness is not a void, but a quality present within the void. As a spatial quality, we could consider emptiness as timeless that at the same time, can be grounded in a particular context. It can be the space in-between but it also can be the remaining part of an uncompleted building. As Koolhaas described the “absence of the built” is how the void is faced, as the negative of a built mass. 

In order to maintain the essence of this emptiness, already present in the current landscape and to make visible the void, the enclosure that contains it is required, but in a way that will not disturb this endless field. Although it is true that there are many possibilities to represent it, one possible approach would be framing the voids by designing the interventions in the in-between spaces and their connections.

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