The Poetics of Space () 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.

Summary

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.

Publication history

The Poetics of Space was first published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1958. In 1964, the Orion Press 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. In 2014, Penguin Books published an edition with a foreword by the novelist Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by the philosopher Richard Kearney.

Reception and influence

Philosophy

The Poetics of Space has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey. Ricœur was influenced by Bachelard's understanding of the imagination. 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." The philosopher Gary Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images. Étienne Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art", and Richard Kearney described the book as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination."

Architecture

Joan Ockman gave The Poetics of Space a positive review in Harvard Design Magazine. She compared Bachelard's views to Heidegger's, and wrote that, alongside works such as Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", The Poetics of Space was a key text for the architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. She also compared Bachelard's views on epistemology to those of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and described him as an influence on the philosopher Michel Foucault, finding it apparent in Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). John R. Stilgoe praised the book's discussion of "the meaning of domestic space".

Literature

Camille 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." Mark Z. Danielewski compared The Poetics of Space to the critic Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973), the essayist Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983), Steve Erickson's novel Days Between Stations (1985), and Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day (2003).

Photography

The 1995 anthology Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology, edited by Steve Yates for the University of New Mexico Press, took its title from Bachelard and presented his account of a space "seized upon by the imagination" as anticipating the concerns of contemporary photography. Individual concepts from the book have since been applied to photographic work: the theorist Ali Shobeiri has used Bachelard's "topoanalysis" and "intimate immensity" to analyze the bodily experience of the photographer, the phenomenologist and photographer Chan-Fai Cheung his "dialectics of outside and inside" to read his own photographs of doors and windows, and the critic Peeter Linnap his notion of "topophilia" to interpret the inward, domestic turn of Estonian photography under Soviet rule.

In a study of the photographer Francesca Woodman, Vanessa Longden reads Woodman's images of decaying interiors against "the limits of Bachelard", arguing that his sheltering, idealized home overlooks gender, inequality, and the material disorder of dwelling. Natalie Payne sets Bachelard's "homely" house against her own photographs of a South African suburban childhood home, reading it as a site of apartheid-era segregation and conformity as much as of shelter.

Visual art and exhibitions

Writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael Cirigliano II read paintings by Valentin de Boulogne through Bachelard's "intimate immensity". Two museum exhibitions have taken their titles from the book: the Dallas Museum of Art's For a Dreamer of Houses (2020) gathered works by Clementine Hunter, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ian Cheng, and Vija Celmins under Bachelard's image of the house, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted Intimate Immensity in 2019. In the catalogue for the latter, the writer Bea Huff Hunter questioned Bachelard's focus on male poets and reframed his "internal immensity" as collective and restorative. The artist and researcher Carl Robinson has invoked Bachelard's description of the poetic image as "a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche" in a practice of painting onto photographs.

See also

• The Poetics of Reverie

• Aesthetics

• Phenomenology (architecture)

• Khôra

References

Bibliography

1. Books

   Journal articles

   Online articles