The calm pasture that directs your attention to that one tree. The expanse of the deep blue sky, in which your eyes desperately seek a cloud. The enormous seascape in which you look for an island to hang on to.
White Space.
For people who live their lives in the middle of a city, it's hard to visualize anything but noise and pattern. Even chaos is more appealing, than an empty area.
I sometimes feel that white space is a play on the latent agoraphobia in the human psyche. And shadows, the need for touch. So, in an antiseptic urban world where people cling tenaciously onto their comfort zone, it's very difficult to push out ideas that are crisp, clean and subtle.
Like the way words play with emotions and silence accentuates sound, design plays on the psychology of a person. It's a simple enough philosophy, which is very hard to combine and express in equal parts in a compelling way. To convince someone of these factors... well, it's easier to just go with the flow instead of saying, "trust me on this."
In the midst of urban Malé, I carry a white space with me. It's not easy to reduce the thousands of thoughts to distill out only the essential, to analyze the distillate and to devise an action to it. There are long periods of waiting, watching, waiting.
You don't have to fill in every moment, every space. Absence speaks too.
