Poetic Of Space Pdf

[Jermale Kunstler]

ThePoetics of Space (French: La Potique 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.

Bachelard 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. He is thus led to consider spatial types such as the attic, the cellar, drawers and the like. Bachelard implicitly urges architects to base their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or may not affect viewers and users of architecture.

Bachelard 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.[2]

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 tienne 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]

The Poetics of Space has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey,[9][10] and the critic Camille Paglia.[11] Ricœur was influenced by Bachelard's understanding of the imagination.[9][10] Casey identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on his work Getting Back into Place (1993). He wrote that Bachelard shared Heidegger's "emphasis on the importance of dwelling places." However, he added that neither Heidegger nor Bachelard "adequately assessed the role of the human body in the experience of significant places."[12] Paglia identified The Poetics of Space as an influence on her work of literary criticism Sexual Personae (1990). She has commented of Bachelard's "dignified yet fluid phenomenological descriptive method" that it "seemed to me ideal for art", and described Bachelard as "the last modern French writer I took seriously."[11]

Other authors who have praised The Poetics of Space include Gilson,[15] Stilgoe,[16] Kearney,[17] and the philosopher Gary Gutting.[18] Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art".[15] Stilgoe praised his discussion of "the meaning of domestic space".[16] Kearney described The Poetics of Space as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination."[17] Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images.[18]

In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes. . . . They have no roots and, what is quite unthinkable for a dweller of houses, skyscrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. The different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy.

But in addition to the intimate nature of verticality, a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses are no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and space becomes an artificial one. Everything about it is mechanical and, on every side, intimate living flees.15

The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what is immemorial.

Towards the end, after talking about nests and shells, Bachelard reflects on the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces, between here and there. The dialectic of sharp division is misguided and harmful. He says:

last night typhoon Chuba kept me awake all night. as the wind pummeled the wall, which made it feel as if the heavy fist of wind were pushing against me, i thought to myself how necessary (even an old, rickety, poorly built country) house is. i live in a traditional Jeju house, which is a rough shod, slap dash piece of architecture, but as that storm lashed the island of Jeju, i thanked my lucky stars for it. it made me smile that you included something Bachelard said about bad weather- a nice Synchronicity. i will have to get my mitts on The Poetics of Space, looks like my sort of read.

If the vehicle stops, however, the frenzied world that just was ceases to be, and now a tranquil, even deadened world has taken its place. We notice hoards of gnats in the air, smell the air, see the wind blowing through the trees, etc. But the blurry object that one drives past is the same as the object one stands in front of. It only appears to move if we move, as does the rest of the landscape. And the speed at which those appear to move is contingent on how fast we move.

I too have been thinking about spatial energies and composition recently. I have only very recently gotten into experimenting structurally with my poetry, and it has opened up a whole new dimension for me in my work. Placement and white space can communicate so much more than the traditional words on a page, reading from left to right.

I love what Ethan says about driving in a car and how it relates to reading lines of poetry. Moving fast keeps scenery and details to a minimum, but at the same time, what we do choose to see around an otherwise unidentifiable space becomes ethereal. Both in poetry and in real life movement.

In 1961, Bachelard was interviewed, aged almost 80, at home in his tiny claustrophobic study in Paris. He sits snugly, seemingly shoe-horned into the only available space, between teetering heaps of books piled floor to ceiling, folios to slim pamphlets, the philosopher incarnate, down to his effulgent Socratic beard and unruly white hair. Life, he tells his awed interviewer lightly, is about thinking and then getting on with living. He admits to listening to the radio news every day.

It is odd that a philosopher who so tenaciously excluded the harsh environments and hard circumstances of the exterior world, in mass culture, politics or architecture, was so welcomed in the modernist late-1960s while writing, essentially, about a nostalgic version of rustic Mediterranean peasant living.

One particularly receptive reader of The Poetics of Space is the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, her work always transfixed by the polarities of absence and presence. The detail of the domestic setting evoked in Untitled (Paperbacks) (1997) is a masterly exploration of negative space but, above all, it culminates in her piece House (1993), now long gone: the concrete cast of an entire terraced house in (then) unfashionable Bow, given a short (artistic) stay of execution before its demolition, conveyed multiple meanings.

The house consists mainly 6 bedrooms with toilet as private function, and support functions as sharing public area. We try both to minimise the private area in order to get public space as much as possible, and also to balance the relationship between private and public functions. By these attempt, the typology of courtyard is instrumented to be mainly functioning the whole house.

Eventually, two small courtyards with flowering tree in the middle are located both sides of bedroom zone - north and south wing. They are set in the between bedrooms, operating as gap to set the privacy and also operating as common area for each zone.

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth

When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate

And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased

When the pennants are waving gaily

When the banners of the world tremble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged can walk into evenings of peace

When religious ritual is not perfumed

By the incense of burning flesh

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the Rising Sun

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world

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