Examining Void as time based and structured immateriality
While living in Berlin throughout its first decade of political and urban re-unification I was fascinated in the power of the cityıs interstices at defining space. Crossing almost daily the vast threshold between former East and former West, and watching this space move from being an insecure lost space ­ some called it a wasteland, others the desert of an apocalypse - into a dense, high tech, commercial urban aggregate, I was gripped by the power of this spaceıs immateriality. The energy lost as new structures went up ­ as in the physical splitting of atoms - and the power that two opposing forces ­ one of construction, and one of immanent disappearance created in effect a powerful media based spatial condition. For, not only was this arena simply a construction site, but it was the heart of a new nation, in which politics and the essence of all things real were played out across a crucial urban zone with an intense and tortured history.

So what is such a void, if not merely a space? It is the structure and presence of immateriality which implies certain actions? Is it part of a psychographic realm of invisible virtual or metaphoric spaces which are equally as much a part of the urban fabric as the physical tangibility of the built environment?

The essay examines the Void as an urban perforation created by a brief moment of critical mass in relation to the imminence of that which is to be built. It may be an incision, measured in terms of time and immateriality, which, for an indeterminate period, across an immeasurable portion of space, defines a relationship between inhabitant and inhabitation. Itıs historical and political presence, be it in Rome, Lisbon, Berlin or New York has defined the urban construct of its host. Much like the expansion of invisible networks, the uneasy drift and periodic contraction of the urban sphere the void plays an increasingly central role in defining the invisible city which has now become part of our urban enclosure.