PHIL'S PHILOSOPHY
Thirty spokes surround one nave,
the usefulness of the wheel is always in that empty innermost.
You molded clay to make a bowl,
the usefulness of the bowl is always in that empty innermost.
You cut out doors and windows to make a house,
their usefulness to a house is always in their empty space.
Therefore profit comes from external form,
but usefulness from the empty innermost.
(Lao Tzu, Tao Teh King – translated by Isabella Mears, 1916)
In 2002, graduate designer Philip Offermanns discovered his fascination with the "aesthetics of emptiness". From it grew a series of artistic works that continues to this day: "The Imprint of Nothingness".
It seeks a single moment. The point where inhalation and exhalation meet — Kumbhaka, the stillness between breaths. The same point at which the foam of a breaking wave withdraws from the shore: the wave is no longer wave, yet has not flowed back. The exact turning point, that fraction of a second of highest tension just before reversal, in which time seems to stand still.
To capture this moment means to take it out of time and translate it into material. The reliefs are made of liquid plaster. At the instant of setting, a deliberate vacuum draws the material upward — and precisely there, between flowing and hardening, it stops. What remains is not a depiction of the transition, but the transition itself, congealed into matter. The boundary between mass and emptiness becomes visible, and it can be traced with the hand. Each piece is unique, because the moment cannot be repeated.
Two years later, Offermanns came across the lines by Lao Tzu quoted here. They named what the works had long been seeking.
And it did not stop at one tradition. What yoga describes as Kumbhaka and Daoism as the efficacy of the hollow, Buddhism knows as Shunyata — an emptiness that is precisely not a nothingness, but the very ground on which anything can arise. Three paths, one finding: the empty is not what is missing. It is what makes possible.
This insight shapes Philip Offermanns' design process to this day. Not the outer form stands at the beginning, but the space it encloses — the space of possibility in which people act, create and live. Form is not the starting point, but the answer.