VORKURS: void interrogates, celebrates, and finds solace in the unknown. Our conversations on ‘void’ produced a slurry of ineffable interpretations-from the abandoned, the forgotten, the banal, and the in-between... to absence, blank pages, and inexplicable feelings which hang in the air of a newly and paradoxically isolated world. Amid this uncertainty laid beauty in ambiguity, as void began to adopt fluidity, and delve into how interpretation interweaves across academia, pedagogy, and practice. VORKURS: void seeks to embrace the unknown, and begin to define the words, drawings, feelings, ideas, sites, and interventions left undefined.

‘Nichts’ is a German word that roughly translates to ‘void, or ‘nothingness, or 'no-thing'-with an even longer list of translations-none of which have direct equivalents in the English language. Within design, language is a tool used to transcend this (lexical) gap, and as designers, we interpret this language through making. This linguistic void in architecture has the potential to elicit extraordinary and idiosyncratic responses, and it is through the physical act of making and drawing in which we confront ambiguity and shape our individualized methods of understanding.

VORKURS: void explores the role of personal interpretation in making and reflecting, and the ‘conceptual void’ that persists in the realm of architectural discourse. Voids are charged absences, unplanned possibilities, and open forums with no active voices.

The theories that the theoreticians spun around their works enabled a wide discourse to develop, elevating architecture to a form of knowledge, lifting it out of the venal chatter of the marketplace. Sadly, those critics and professors have died, leaving a conceptual-and critical-void.1

Let this medley of writings be a meditation on uncertainty, on substance in making, and in populating the void. "As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.2

We hope these pages incite curiosity, conversation, and comfort in the unknown.

-Maria Stephens

Executive Editor

1 Lebbeus Woods, “Taking a position” Essay. In Slow Manifesto - Lebbeus Woods Blog. New York, NY:Princeton Architectural Press, 2015.

2 Albert Einstein

On First Looking into the Void

DEBORA GREGER

Beinahe Nichts

MARTIN GUNDERSON

A Question of How to Draw the Way Space is Charged

NAT CHARD

Void als Substraktion oder Konstruktion als Addition

DENIS ANDERNACH