AbstractWe study topological constructions in the recursion theoretic framework of the lattice of recursively enumerable open subsets of a topological spaceX. Various constructions produce complemented recursively enumerable open sets with additional recursion theoretic properties, as well as noncomplemented open sets. In contrast to techniques in classical topology, we construct a disjoint recursively enumerable collection of basic open sets which cannot be extended to a recursively enumerable disjoint collection of basic open sets whose union is dense inX.