"Extracting the Figure within the Void": ...The Experience within the solid void..

Perhaps the key to life is to release this tension inside all of us. It was tension that provoked certain events. It was tension that gave it form. It made a relationship as well as break it. The harmony of opposites attracting and finding the link between its extremes. Tension causes the birth of man, and it was also tension that provokes them to destroy. It is this struggle to link the two extremes together that hinders its progression. It paralyzes the mind to progress whether it needs to go backwards or forward. We accumulate components, layers and layers of multiplicity to spaces we find empty to the point where the mind becomes stuck in a realm that no longer wants to function. A congested haven no longer desiring anything new.

By extracting the space that links the two extremes (The old void), we not only redefine what has been released, but we have now given life to a new form. This new kind of Tension becomes a solid form (a positive space) a new definition, a new freedom. The next “tabula rasa” to build upon in life and in Architecture. This is the new type of Void.

Site proposal:

The Tension between Man and God.

Genesis 11: 1 – 9

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

This is a short excerpt from the Bible. According to this passage, it was the tension between man and God that created the first of "many" languages. This passage tells the story of a tower that was in the process of creation to celebrate the pride of man and the rise of human technology of their time. The tower was to rise so high it is meant to touch the heavens. This idea that Man can reach God, and pretty much symbolize that Man can be as powerful as God, made God angry. He made each person speak a different language, so that they would not be able to unify and communicate the building of this "evil" structure.

This story reveals that tension gave birth to its fragments, from a unified language to diverse confusion between societies. It is according to Christian belief, is the birth of the nations. The idea that the history is still dominant within the walls of the site tells me that the negative space within it evokes another story. A story only the walls can speak of, and the language that derived the form. Therefore I have chosen Babylon as my site of exploration.