Designing Empty Space

This morning, I moved some furniture around to find a better way to use the space in my office. I am reminded of second year architecture school and Hertzberger.

I flipped back through my Instagram and found this little drawing I made while reading Lessons for Students in Architecture. I’m not an aesthetics driven designer, how something is perceived is not my business. Sure, I have a sense of what looks right or wrong, but it isn’t what drives me. Some would call me a functionalist. I wasn’t always so confident in my design decisions until I started down a path from that day made that little sketch.

Which culminated in a diagram about multi-use spaces.

Empty space is not human space. I give you a log from a tree, freshly cut. You can’t use it until you do something to it. Cut it down to 400mm chunks and you can sit on them. Slice it up and make it into a house or furniture. Chop it up, wait a year for it to season, before you put it into your fireplace.

Empty space can only be gazed upon, when we enter it, we put our human desire to use it.

The space next to the window in my office was empty this morning and now it is not. There is a chair there. And a plant on a stool. Without the plant, the chair would not invite rest. You sit in the chair and there is too much attention on you. You sit in the chair and the plant sits with you.

Nobody wants to dine alone.