To write something about emptiness is in itself somewhat contradictory. Even brainstorming for a blog post leads to numerous quid pro quos, one being the fact that we would fill this space with something where instead we could leave some blanks, and write nothing.

And the contradiction remains, in all walks of life.

From cities to specific industries, emptiness is a definitional aspect of many trades, that takes for most creative professionals significations that are both genuinely different and wholly convergent. In architecture, in music, in graphic design, emptiness is not only a call to action, but an inherent part of the activity. It constitutes the score on which creations are laid out.

Emptiness is what is left in places where nothing has been built. In architecture as in urbanism, it compels developers to propose concepts that seek to fill what's in between, what's lacking, what remains to be done. Emptiness lies at the basis of the evolution of cities and, in many way, contributes significantly to the success of those we deem to call creative : city-museums like Paris or Vienna, while they may host mainstreamed versions of the underground, are not conducive to the creative moments we have described in "Montreal, stories of everything". They are not ripe for the massive transformation that such moments entail. They are, in many ways, "finished".

In taoism, emptiness is conceived as potential : it is something that waits to be filled and, by extension, to be realized. Only the empty soul may give birth to ideas ; the white of the sheet, the hole in the whole… Emptiness is necessary : one hundred thousand architectural images, each more appealing than the next, interact before our stunned eyes – we need to find places where we may rest, and focus. Think of a 1000-piece puzzle, where one piece is missing. The hole left by it becomes an obsession.

Unused places draw our attention. Nature is, in essence, uncomfortable with emptiness. Human nature, even more so. We take perceived landmarks as opportunities and structure them, upwards and onwards, as part of the foundational actions that make societies. It was Rousseau who wrote that the first to recognize the legitimacy of his neighbours' fences was the founder of modern society.

The parks, the streets, the terraces, indefinite sites are responsible for all creation – it is where manifestos are written, paintings are decided, ideas are edified, upwards, onwards, undergrounds to middlegrounds. Metaphysical emptinesses have brought religion and ideologies, architectural emptinesses adopted them and made the cathedrals and institutions that promoted and justified the underlying beliefs. Every myth begins with an absence that, through human or divine intervention, was made into something.

Music, like architecture, strives on emptiness. Composers will say that the notes that make the melody are doing nothing but disrupting silence. The absence of music is natural, in outer space, in outer-lives, the world buzzes its cacophony, which acts as a monotonous stream of nothingness. Emptiness then is simultaneously a lack of strategy and something that one may long for, search actively, as an escape to an emptiness that builds of an endless stream of unrelated noises.

Must we trust emptiness to create itself? Is there too much, or too little of it? Must we formalize it and accept it, long for silence in urbanities as creative inspirations? Emptiness imposes something, asks something from us. Attacks of emptiness. Berlin fights Paris, until it too becomes completely build, through centuries of endless strivings, seized opportunities, emptinesses fulfilled.

Like the empty spaces between the letters, this sans serif font that you are reading right now, the "h", the "o", the "p", the emptiness between the lines, the white behind all these letters.

The world was created from emptiness, and it remains filled with it. And that's ok.