The Poetics of Space

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It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Throughout this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.” And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.” His analysis of the poetic image is unique and, I think, quite beautiful. The rest of the book is an application of this theory to various poetic images - mostly relating, in some way, to the home. While some of his analyses are compelling, his philosophy is heavily grounded in psychoanalysis. As such, he implicitly argues for the universality of image responses - that these poetic images have certain universal resonances. Given the diversity of human experience, particularly in the 20th and 21st century, I just don't buy it. His evidence is various extracts from poetry in which his images seem to be functioning in the same way - but it strikes me that diligent research could probably turn up any number of counter-examples. I'll accept that what he explores is what the images could be, but I won't go any farther than that. Gutting, Gary (2017). "Bachelard, Gaston". In Audi, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-64379-6.

I read this book while en route to Las Vegas for a family gathering. Las Vegas is a space I hate with unspeakable disgust- yet, I remember reading the Poetic of Space in this environment and it made the whole incident even more surreal- I copied many passages from the book into my notebook. It is that kind of book, where fragments capture a thought you could never get right into words. In every great work, no matter how dark," Richard Kearney said, "one will find a moment of what Bachelard calls epiphany — an instant that breaks out of chronological time and that gives us hope that things can be different." The ideas drawn from The Poetics of Space also live and breathe in the paper-thin porcelain boxes created by Irish ceramic artist, Isobel Egan. Bachelard] is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Satre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with a proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possible – he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination …”As a teenager I used to think “I CAN’T have just dreamed that up!” I used to remember it when listening to Beethoven, for some strange reason. Pallasmaa sees our homes as live creatures and likens our relationship with our homes to those with our spouses, our children, our most intimate. Pallasmaa believes we ought to look to Bachelard as a compass. The Poetics of Space ( French: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about architecture by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-017209-2. Why does it matter? Why do we need to localize, contain, or even imagine things like memory? For understanding. A different facet of anything helps us gain perspective—literally—and, thus, understand notions that might otherwise overwhelm and be ignored. Of all aspects of self-awareness, our mortality might be the most difficult. It is common for writers to anchor concepts of death and mortality in physical spaces. From Joan Didion, who wrote about "twilight blue nights" after her daughter's death, to Christopher Hitchens, who imagined, when dying, that he crossed over to a "land of the ill." The reveries of mind cumulate into creating those images which bring harmony in the existence. Harmony brings joy within the being. Camus’ invincible summer, in presence of Algerian Sun and Sea, spring forth due to the reveries his mind is captivated with. Reveries of the places of his childhood – the house he lived in. For him, this summer is the harmony between his existence and an indifferent Universe.This harmony is his revolt.The Poetics of Space was first published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1958. In 1964, the Orion Press, Inc. published the book, with a foreword by the philosopher Étienne Gilson, in an English translation by the writer Maria Jolas. Beacon Press republished the work in English in 1969. In 1994, it republished it in a new edition with an added foreword by the historian John R. Stilgoe. [3] [4] [5] In 2014, Penguin Books published an edition with a foreword by the novelist Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by the philosopher Richard Kearney. [6] [7] [8] Reception [ edit ] Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Spacehas been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces,“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

Three or four decades ago a book entitled The Poetics of Space could hardly fail to stir the architectural imagination. First published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard’s philosophical meditation on oneiric space appeared at a moment when phenomenology and the pursuit of symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture seemed to open fertile ground within the desiccated culture of late modernism. “We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms,” Bachelard wrote in a chapter entitled “House and Universe.” “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” 2 In lyrical chapters on the “topography of our intimate being”—of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar and attic—he undertook a systematic study, or “topoanalysis,” of the “space we love.” Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psychodynamics of the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imaginary a counter to both technoscientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as an alternative to the schematicism of the other emerging intellectual tendency of the day, structuralism. In his book Existence, Space and Architecture (1971), Christian Norberg-Schulz, the most prolific and long-term proponent of a phenomenological architecture, asserted that “further research on architectural space is dependent upon a better understanding of existential space,” citing Bachelard’s Poetics of Space together with Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s Mensch und Raum (1963), the chapter on space in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception (1962; original French, 1945), and two key works by Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962; German, 1927) and the essay “ Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971; German, 1954), as fundamental texts. 3 To read and enjoy Bachelard's work takes a great deal of mental visualization, which some people can do more naturally than others, do not be discouraged. For example, his statement that a poet will "seek warmth and the quiet life in the arms of a curve" made me picture Allen Ginsberg on a swing. It takes special conjecture to move further. One has only to look at pictures of ammonites to realize that, as early as the Mesozoic Age, mollusks constructed their shells according to the teachings of a transcendental geometry […] A poet naturally understands this esthetic category of life. Cit. in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 397, n.2.Every nook and cranny, every secret, mystical corner, each minute detail of your home and of the enthralled childhood you once enjoyed would flood your heart with a forgotten, Elysial joy...