The Poetics of Space
.jpg) Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Gaston Bachelard |
|---|---|
| Original title | La Poétique de l'Espace |
| Translator | Maria Jolas |
| Language | French |
| Series | Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine |
| Subject | Architecture |
| Publisher | Presses Universitaires de France |
| Publication date | 1958 |
| Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1964 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 241 (English translation) |
| ISBN | 0-8070-6439-4 (English edition) |
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.
Summary
[edit]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.
Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home…. Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts—serious, sad thoughts—and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space[1]
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]
Publication history
[edit]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.[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 and influence
[edit]Philosophy
[edit]The Poetics of Space has influenced the philosophers Paul Ricœur and Edward S. Casey. 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."[11] The philosopher Gary Gutting credited Bachelard with subtly explaining the meaning of archetypal images.[12] Étienne Gilson credited Bachelard with making "one of the major modern contributions to the philosophy of art",[13] and Richard Kearney described the book as "the most concise and consummate expression of Bachelard's philosophy of imagination."[14]
Architecture
[edit]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).[15] John R. Stilgoe praised the book's discussion of "the meaning of domestic space".[16]
Literature
[edit]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."[17] 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).[18]
Photography
[edit]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.[19] 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,[20] the phenomenologist and photographer Chan-Fai Cheung his "dialectics of outside and inside" to read his own photographs of doors and windows,[21] and the critic Peeter Linnap his notion of "topophilia" to interpret the inward, domestic turn of Estonian photography under Soviet rule.[22]
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.[23] 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.[24]
Visual art and exhibitions
[edit]Writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael Cirigliano II read paintings by Valentin de Boulogne through Bachelard's "intimate immensity".[25] 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,[26] and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted Intimate Immensity in 2019.[27] 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.[27] 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.[28]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ↑ Bachelard 1994, p. 61.
- ↑ Bachelard 1994, pp. 3–4, 19.
- ↑ Bachelard 1994, p. iv.
- ↑ Gilson 1994, pp. xi–xiv.
- ↑ Stilgoe 1994, pp. vii–x.
- ↑ Bachelard 2014, p. iv.
- ↑ Danielewski 2014, pp. vii–xvi.
- ↑ Kearney 2014, pp. xvii–xxvii.
- ↑ Ricœur 1970, pp. 15–16.
- ↑ Ricœur 1979, p. 147.
- ↑ Casey 1993, p. xv.
- ↑ Gutting 2017, p. 82.
- ↑ Gilson 1994, p. xiv.
- ↑ Kearney 2014, p. xix.
- ↑ Ockman 1998.
- ↑ Stilgoe 1994, p. vii.
- ↑ Paglia 1993, pp. 114, 129.
- ↑ Danielewski 2014, p. viii.
- ↑ Yates 1995.
- ↑ Shobeiri 2024.
- ↑ Cheung 2009.
- ↑ Linnap 2002.
- ↑ Longden 2026.
- ↑ Payne 2023.
- ↑ Cirigliano II 2016.
- ↑ Nelson 2020.
- 1 2 Mir 2019.
- ↑ Robinson 2016.
Bibliography
[edit]- Books
- Bachelard, Gaston (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3.
- Bachelard, Gaston (2014). The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1.
- Casey, Edward S. (1993). Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0253313317.
- Danielewski, Mark Z. (2014). "Foreword". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1.
- Gilson, Étienne (1994). "Foreword to the 1964 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3.
- Gutting, Gary (2017). "Bachelard, Gaston". In Audi, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-64379-6.
- Kearney, Richard (2014). "Introduction". The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-310752-1.
- Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-017209-2.
- Ricœur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02189-5.
- Ricœur, Paul (1979). "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling". In Sacks, Sheldon (ed.). On Metaphor. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-73334-3.
- Stilgoe, John R. (1994). "Foreword to the 1994 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3.
- Yates, Steve, ed. (1995). Poetics of Space: A Critical Photographic Anthology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-1521-2. OCLC 1150965346.
- Journal articles
- Shobeiri, Ali (2024). "The Afloat Photographer: Corporeal Immersivity as an Instance of Sheer Inactivity". Image & Narrative. 25 (2): 129–142. ISSN 1780-678X.
- Online articles
- Cirigliano II, Michael (6 December 2016). "Intimate Immensity: Valentin's Poetics of Space". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
- Mir, Stan (7 April 2019). "Finding Intimacy in the Immensity of Infinity". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 1 July 2026.
- Nelson, Hilde (17 April 2020). "The House and the Dream of the Poetic Image". Dallas Museum of Art. Retrieved 30 June 2026.
- Ockman, Joan (Fall 1998). "The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard". Harvard Design Magazine. Retrieved 2 April 2019.
