THE POETICS OF SPACE

 

THE POETICS OF SPACE

BY: GASTON BACHELARD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• At the twilight of his career, he decides to take a new approach by reflecting on literature and poetry and using imagination to explore a reality that is not subject to reasoning. 
• His implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences as it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.
• He also discusses psychoanalysis and the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Comparing the psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to his subject matter, he sees merit in both, but finds the phenomenological approach preferable.
• He observes that imagination is a major power of human nature.
• He packs his text with lyrical quotations, helping the reader to imagine the house as a place sewn together from poetic images, facets and stories.

THE REVIEW 

• A densely lyrical, almost magical book on the experience of architecture
• It is a non-fiction philosophical study of inhabited space.
• In it, he courses through the realms we inhabit – indoor and outdoor
• This passionate journey through space is also an exploration of  the hallways of the mind.
• He applies the method of phenomenology to architecture, basing his analysis not on purported origins (as was the trend in Enlightenment thinking about architecture) but on lived experience in architectural places and their contexts in nature. 
• He focuses especially on the personal, emotional response to buildings both in life and in literary works, both in prose and in poetry. 
• The author uses the house, which is full of sensations and subjective imagination native to anyone who lives in one, to demonstrate the reality of poetic imagery.
• He makes a parallel between the arrangement of a house and the ability of man to think and visualize, placing emphasis on the imagination as a major power of human nature.
• He comments on felicitous or happy space termed as "topophilia" that is eulogized and enjoyed.
• He calls it a "phenomenological" inquiry into the origins of consciousness where an image suddenly appears as a "phenomenon," real and convincing in itself. 
• He also brings out how such rectilinearity so welcomes human complexity and how the house adapts to its inhabitants. 
• He also shades light on how the Influence is mutual – the house makes an impression on the human and the human makes an impression on the house. 
•  He states that the house, as it protects and gives form to human lives, acquires a personality and psychology of its own.
• He registers the significance of old tower and peasant hut, the smallest casket and the shadiest corner. 
• He begins with images of intimacy in the houses of man, and then follows with things in those houses, hidden things, and houses of other animals, nests and shells.
• For him, a house, an attic, a shell, a nest are not metaphors signifying something else, but full-blown images that spring spontaneously from the soul.
• He explains how the house functions around two axes of existence: 1). A house is a vertical entity, running between the polarities of attic and cellar and 2). A house is a concentrated entity containing numerous objects and shapes, each invested with a heavy and specific meaning.
• Lastly, he reflects on the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces and thinks about roundness – the quality of our planet, the shape of “heaven’s dome” – he tries to make sense of the shape. He finds a kind of revelation in the tree.
• He finishes his study of poetic imagery with comments on size and notions of interior and exterior, open and closed spaces, roundness and book subjects. 
• The fact that poetic imagery is not subject to rules of logic but that does not lessen its reality.
• This book is a developed original scheme for the interaction of these three elements physical space, consciousness and poetry.