''The Poetics of Space'' (french: La Poétique de l'Espace) is a 1958 book about
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
by the French philosopher
Gaston Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard (; ; 27 June 1884 – 16 October 1962) was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter, he introduced the concepts of ''epistemological obstacle'' and '' epis ...
. The book is considered an important work about art. Commentators have compared Bachelard's views to those of the philosopher
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th ce ...
.
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
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...
and the work of the psychiatrist
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, phi ...
. 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, Inc. published the book, with a foreword by the philosopher
Étienne Gilson
Étienne Henri Gilson (; 13 June 1884 – 19 September 1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition ...
, in an English translation by the writer
Maria Jolas
Maria Jolas (January 12, 1893 – March 4, 1987), born Maria McDonald, was one of the founding members of ''transition'' in Paris with her husband Eugene Jolas.
Life
Jolas was born in Louisville, Kentucky,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
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by the philosopher Richard Kearney.
Reception
''The Poetics of Space'' has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey, and the critic Camille Paglia. 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." 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."
Joan Ockman gave ''The Poetics of Space'' a positive review in ''
Harvard Design Magazine
''Harvard Design Magazine'' (ISSN 1093-4421) is a biannual publication of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It is indexed by the standard subject bibliographies, including Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, Bibliography of the History ...
''. She compared Bachelard's views to Heidegger's, and wrote that, alongside works such as Heidegger's ''
Being and Time
''Being and Time'' (german: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 '' magnum opus'' of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. ''Being and Time'' had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many oth ...
'' (1927) and his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", ''The Poetics of Space'' was a key text for the architect
Christian Norberg-Schulz
Christian Norberg-Schulz (23 May 1926 – 28 March 2000) was a Norwegian architect, author, educator and architectural theorist. Norberg-Schulz was part of the Modernist Movement in architecture and associated with architectural phenomenology.
B ...
. She also compared Bachelard's views on
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Epis ...
to those of the philosopher
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradig ...
and described him as an influence on the philosopher Michel Foucault, finding it apparent in Foucault's '' The Archaeology of Knowledge'' (1969). Danielewski compared ''The Poetics of Space'' to the critic
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking worl ...
's ''
The Anxiety of Influence
''The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry'' is a 1973 book by Harold Bloom. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism. Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hin ...
'' (1973), the essayist
Lewis Hyde
Lewis Hyde (born 1945) is a scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic and writer whose scholarly work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property.
Profile
Hyde was born in Cambridge, MA. He is the son of Elizabeth Sanfor ...
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as ''Days Between Stations'', '' Tours of the Black Clock'' and '' Zeroville'', he is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the American Academy of Arts a ...
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, scie ...
's novel ''
Against the Day
''Against the Day'' is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spr ...
'' (2003).
Other authors who have praised ''The Poetics of Space'' include Gilson, Stilgoe, Kearney, and the philosopher
Gary Gutting
Gary Michael Gutting (April 11, 1942 – January 18, 2019) was an American philosopher and holder of an endowed chair in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
His daughter is writer Tasha Alexander.
Work
Gutting was an expert on the phil ...
. Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art". Stilgoe praised his discussion of "the meaning of domestic space". Kearney described ''The Poetics of Space'' as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination." Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images.
See also
*
Aesthetics
Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...
*
Phenomenology (architecture)
Phenomenology in architecture can be understood as a discursive and realist attempt to understand and embody the philosophical insights of phenomenology.
According to Dan Zahavi:Phenomenology shares the conviction that the critical stance proper ...
*
Khôra
''Khôra'' (also ''chora''; grc, χώρα) was the territory of the Ancient Greek ''polis'' outside the city proper. The term has been used in philosophy by Plato to designate a receptacle (as a "third kind" 'triton genos'' '' Timaeus'' 48e4), a ...