[BE] Dissimilarly to American cities, many European cities were built by subtraction rather than addition. Public spaces were generated by carving away continuous fabric of edifice to liberate masses out of intricate webs of void. Open spaces became figure in the figure/ground relationship of the cities’ abstract composition. Such quality is obviously manifested in Nolli’s map of Rome, for instance. Demolishing a part of such entity of ground inevitably leaves a trace of its missing tissue.
