4/26/2020 How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy | Aeon Essays

Photo by Eve Arnold/Magnum

Intimate spaces
In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
created a philosophy of at-homeness, rich in
emotion and memory
Gillian Darley

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I bought my copy of Gaston Bachelard’s e Poetics of Space at the Architectural

Association’s Triangle Bookshop, at a time when inner London telephone codes still
began with ‘071’ and while I was the architectural correspondent of the Sunday
newspaper e Observer. at copy has been on the bookshelf above my desk ever
since, kept for a lull and quieter times. Now, refreshing my memories of the book, at a
moment when the prevailing blandness of planning and design rarely allows for a
subjective, even poetic, response, I’ve plunged back into grappling with its enduring,
infuriating attractions.

La Poétique de l’Espace (1958) was first published in English in 1964, two years after
Bachelard’s death, then in paperback in 1969, and reissued in 1994. An allusive little
book, its author was a highly-respected philosopher who late in his career had turned
from science to poetry. Nothing about his intellectual journey had been orthodox,
particularly as measured against the rigid norms of French academic life and
advancement. He was from a provincial background in Champagne, a post-office
employee, who rose largely through intellectual tenacity to hold a chair in philosophy
at the Sorbonne. Bachelard was, by all accounts, an inimitable lecturer, and on the
page he wanders around, as amiable and gentle a cicerone as you could hope to find,
introducing himself as ‘an addict of felicitous reading’ whose aim is to extend
perceptions, deepen resonances and reinforce connections. e Poetics of Space, his
final book, soon appeared on academic reading lists, and in schools of architecture
and art, squeezed in alongside the works of better-known cultural theorists and
practitioners. Surprisingly enough, it is still there.

‘Bachelardian’ has become cultural shorthand for the lyrical possibilities of conjuring
memory from buildings, and it is this book that brought it, and him, to prominence
outside France. e first chapter, dealing with ‘the house from cellar to garret’ might
well be all that the student will read, since, unlike the direct and determinist link
between ideas of surveillance in Michel Foucault’s writings and their roots
<https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever>
in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Bachelard’s dependence on poetry, with digressions
into botany, Carl Jung and much else, is intriguing but always elliptical. It remains,
according to my limited international straw poll across the generations, a book still
more often cited than read.

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Gaston Bachelard in his study in 1961. Photo by Bernard Pascucci/INA/Getty

In 1961, Bachelard was interviewed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=qu70lxwFoTA> , 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.

As Foucault said <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6TghIrYEc> of Bachelard a

few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any
universal judgments: ‘He plays against his own culture with his own culture.’ He stood
apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor
phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw
material.

B achelard’s previous work had advanced the theory of epistemological rupture,

widely accepted by Foucault and others, in which scientific thought is freed from
what had previously constrained or encumbered it. In subtle ways, left to the
interpretation of the reader, Bachelard now signalled an equally clean break with the
weary sterility of post-war modernism in architecture by giving weight to the
unforgettable in the context of the ordinary. He considered that ‘inhabited space
transcends geometric space’ but, characteristically, his words did no more than imply
the considerable value of imprinted memory or the trace of meaning.

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In the book, he guides us through an actual or imagined home (your choice), its
comforts and mysteries, assembled and brought into focus, in a place and at a time
undefined except by the limits of our own daydreams, longings and memories – those
inner landscapes from which, he said, new worlds can be made. e philosopher
evokes an idealised past, places the miniature against the immense, and guides us
back into childhood. Once there, at home, he reminds us how we tend to look down
the cellar stairs, apprehensively, while gazing upwards, towards the attic, always
eager. Uncertainty is set against promise, dark against light. is house is a key to an
inner self, ‘for childhood is certainly greater than reality’.

ematically, Bachelard divided the schematic house into a vertical entity and a
concentrated one, too: ‘a body of images that give mankind proof or illusions of
stability’. His use of architectural phenomenology lets the mind loose to make its way,
always ready for what might emerge in the process. e house is ‘the topography of
our intimate being’, both the repository of memory and the lodging of the soul – in
many ways simply the space in our own heads. He offered no shortcuts or routes of
avoidance, since ‘the phenomenologist has to pursue every image to the very end’.

After a journey through ‘undergrounds of legendary fortified castles … a cluster of

cellars for roots’, he thrusts upon his readers, in a quite shocking change of tone and
imagery, a complete antithesis, in which his prejudice against urbanity and the
apparent expedience of mass-produced housing is laid bare: ‘In Paris there are no
houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes.’ ese
buildings have no ‘roots’ as he would recognise them, for there are no cellars in
skyscrapers:

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. e different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into

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one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and
classifying the values of intimacy.

Further, there is no mediating space; everything becomes mechanistic and ‘on every
side, intimate living flees’.

In this astonishing and singular outburst, spine-chilling to read after the Grenfell
Tower fire in London this June, Bachelard seems to be invoking an extreme vision in
which individuals must fend for themselves, society having turned a blind eye to them
in their dystopia. ere is no other passage in the book that is as graphic, or
particular. But he had been struggling, he admits, both with Paris and with insomnia,
regaining his equilibrium only by returning to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s treasured
evocation of a lamp burning in the window of a hermit’s hut, conjured up by the last
(or first?) light switched on in the street as we walk home. Now the house can again
assume ‘powers of protection against the forces that besiege it’ before turning into a
world of its own.

The journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers,

cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks

An elderly man with his heart still in rural France, and a marked provincial accent to
prove it, what did the increasingly unfamiliar modern city, its economics and politics,
have to offer him? Warning against ‘very definitely closed utilitarianism’, he refrains
from suggesting whether the anomie of the collectivist vision that he depicted was
that of a capitalist or a communist society. Such was his seeming innocence, most
readers do not even pose the question.

Indoors, in e Poetics of Space, the journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers,
cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks, although he warns, somewhat testily,
against their use as gratuitous metaphors (and he is strongly averse to the idea of
habit). But his pages offer continuous temptation to stray, to indulge in one’s own
felicitous, serendipitous process. So in Amanda Vickery’s exploration of 18th-century
domestic life for ordinary women, Behind Closed Doors (2009), she illustrates how the
possessor of a simple locked container was immediately in a superior position to her
peers. A single lock made her unimaginably luckier than another servant with, at
most, a hiding place behind a wainscot or under a floorboard. at box or drawer,
with its key, pointed to a tiny, invaluable measure of privacy, and the securing of
personal space, especially in crowded, shared rooms.

e wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or
cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can
all share, adult or child. e appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic
architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook,
seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright’s enduring penchant for an immense

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fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the
conversation pit – with or without its trademark shagpile carpet. e British writer
Ken Worpole suggests that Bachelard’s observations apply particularly to recent
developments in hospice design, in which, by focusing on the psychologically
resonant imagery of the home, the hearth and the kitchen table, the familiar and the
reassuring, ‘places of helpless waiting are re-fashioned … as places of contemplation
and a gathering-in of memory and self-discovery’.

I t 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.

Bachelard shared something of the instincts and preferences demonstrated in graphic

form in the American writer and architect Bernard Rudofsky’s seminal Architecture
Without Architects (1964). is book began life as an exhibition at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art, supported by august figures in the contemporary
architectural pantheon such as Walter Gropius, Gio Ponti and Kenzo Tange. In
celebrating the seductive buildings of ‘humaneness’, Rudofsky illustrated the ‘nearly
immutable’ qualities of vernacular architecture: its patterning, materials and
instinctual planning, how it transmitted memory and accommodated the ‘vagaries of
climate and the challenge of topography’. It was, in short, everything that modernism
was not – for better and for worse.

Earlier, W H Auden had coined the word ‘topophilia’ when he was writing,
surprisingly enough, an admiring introduction to an American edition of John
Betjeman’s poems Slick but not Streamlined in 1947. Late in life, Auden wrote a set of
15 verses titled anksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). ey were a celebration of
domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms
of the house, including ‘the Cave of Meaning’ (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his
bedroom ‘the Cave of Nakedness’. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of ‘a
place I may go both in and out of’. By then, had the (French-speaking) Auden read
Bachelard’s journey through a house of memories – such a topophiliac paradise?

By the time that the British architecture critic Peter Reyner Banham wrote his love
letter to the south-western desert, Scenes in America Deserta (1982), it was almost
inevitable that he would turn to Bachelard for elucidation since he ‘has become the
most quoted authority on matters spatial in the circles in which I move’. To his
disappointment, Banham found the noted thinker ‘skimpy and self-defensive’ for his
purposes, since the only immensity promised, ‘a philosophical category of day-
dream’, was that within oneself – altogether too fuzzy for the chronicler of New
Brutalism. Perhaps Banham, his heart so recently captured by the desert, was
offended by Bachelard’s offhand remark that an immense horizon of sand might be
no more than a ‘schoolboy’s desert, the Sahara to be found in every school atlas’.

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The ‘cupboardness’ of children’s play areas; a library tucked

beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner

For all that, Banham’s fashionable world of mouldbreaking American architects,

notably the postmodern Charles Moore and the theorist Christopher Alexander,
author of A Pattern Language (1977), had long been in thrall to Bachelard’s book.
Moore had strong ideas about the relationship of architecture to history and, beyond
the private house, about the design of public space that served to enliven society. As
the American critic Alexandra Lange has written, Moore had a particular penchant for
leftover domestic spaces: ‘nooks, porches, lofts, and shelves designed to create room
for collections and hobbies, shelter for different moods, and stages for more intimate
conversations’. He referred to them as ‘saddlebags’ but they were, surely, merely
assembled poetic spaces. Or maybe they sit alongside Bachelard’s admired Bernard
Palissy, the 16th-century architect and landscape gardener whose investigation of
fortress-building in nature included a slug that did so from its own saliva and
reminded Bachelard of his early days in the natural sciences. Observing that the
tiniest details ‘increases an object’s stature’ and, quoting from a dictionary of
Christian botany, which exemplified the periwinkle as observed by a ‘man with a
magnifying glass’, Bachelard transported his readers to a ‘sensitive point of
objectivity’.

Bachelard’s earliest Anglophone readers in the fields of architecture and design had
been in retreat from formulaic modernism and the backwash of deracination.
Gradually the ripples spread. In Space and Learning (2008), the admired Dutch
architect Herman Hertzberger gave Bachelard a charming nod when he referred to
the ‘cupboardness’ of small children’s play areas: a little library tucked beneath some
stairs, the inventive use of available nooks and crannies and everywhere, ‘the
kangaroo as our ideal’ offering safety and sanctuary, the doorknob that is at eye level
for a small child, the drawer that harbours treasures, and a universe of emotions in the
corner. Following that, Colin Ward, author of e Child in the City (1978) and the most
perceptive of British writers on the built environment, celebrated Bachelard’s notion
of ‘experienced reality’ within childhood, a vein of rich memory available to be evoked
in adulthood.

In his neat phrase ‘reading a room’, Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some
place in their own past: ‘You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.’ As if in answer to
that very personal quest, his description of ‘emotional shapes of the spaces inside
houses and flats’ helpfully reflected Jungian ideas for the Anglo-French feminist writer
Michéle Roberts as she aligned textual and spatial strands from diaries in her memoir
Paper Houses (2007). Roberts configures her own journey through life as one through
the city, moving from space to space, in and out of imagination. She responds to
Jungian cellars, subterranean and potentially fearful places, set against attics, light
and without menace, which as Bachelard confirmed ‘can always efface the fears of

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night’ but which are, essentially, the terrain of the German critic Walter Benjamin.
Decades after the apogee of post-modernism and the lingering, often abstruse,
arguments around ‘critical regionalism’, Bachelard’s book still offered ‘a nest for
dreaming, a shelter for imagining’ as John Stilgoe, professor of the history of
landscape at Harvard University, wrote in his introduction to the 1994 edition.

T he enduring position of e Poetics of Space as a key text sees Bachelard as

omnipresent. e Pritzker prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor might
have been channelling him in his RIBA Royal Gold Medal address in 2013 as he
spoke of architecture shorn of intrusive symbolism and imbued with experience,
leading to the ultimate goal, ‘to create emotional space’. Emphasising light, materials
(involving a sophisticated return to the vernacular, in the sense of the language of the
locale) and atmosphere, intensified by remote and particular locations such as the
house in south Devon now under construction in the Living Architecture programme,
there is a clear confluence between Zumthor’s wish to be seen, above all, as an
‘architect of place’ and Bachelard’s subtle and romantic insights.

e approach can also point to an unfurling of levels of meaning and reality within an
existing structure. For the architect Biba Dow, of Dow Jones in London, e Poetics of
Space long ago became ‘my favourite and most essential book on architecture’. Dow
and her partner Alun Jones were introduced to Bachelard’s writing by Dalibor Vesely,
their first-year tutor at the University of Cambridge school of architecture. e poetic
approach offered rich possibilities for extracting wider meaning, phenomenology, and
the permitted exercise of the imagination. For example, the medieval church of St
Mary-at-Lambeth in south London, once almost derelict, now offers a series of
discrete spaces in its current life as the Garden Museum, on which Dow Jones worked
in two successive phases. A chapel has become a cabinet of curiosity, displaying
treasures associated with the great plant-hunter and gardener John Tradescant the
Elder, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as of the original South
Lambeth ‘Ark’ from which it grew. Beyond the outer walls, they have added a ‘cloister’
in the midst of which lies Tradescant under his exotic carved-chest tomb, a world of
curiosity in itself.

But it is in the wider field of urban design that e Poetics of Space seems to me to have
the greatest resonance, through the work of the American academic urbanist Kevin
Lynch and others. e journey between the open vista towards the intimacy of near-
enclosure was at the heart of Townscape, the campaign (or movement) waged on the
pages of e Architectural Review from 1948 onwards by the British architect Gordon
Cullen and the magazine’s editor, Hubert de Cronin Hastings.

It is as much the inspiration for the urban designer as it is

the source of invaluable mental furniture for the small child

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Less obvious was the intellectual weight of Nikolaus Pevsner celebrating, for example,
‘precinctual’ or collegiate planning in Oxford. He later thanked Hastings for
encouraging his pleasurable diversion into the picturesque, allowing him, so firmly
tarred with the modernist brush in the eyes of the world, ‘the saving grace of just a
little bit of inconsistency’.

Cullen and his colleague Ian Nairn extended the visual analysis
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2012.724856> that
Townscape suggested to a number of US cities in a contribution to Exploding
Metropolis (1957) where, alongside the urbanist Jane Jacobs, they succinctly analysed,
in word and image, the distinct and identifiable spatial qualities of cities from Austin
to San Francisco, New York to Pittsburgh. Townscape and the contemporary
exploration of ideas of ‘prospect and refuge’ – the terms, used widely in landscape
theory, are those of the late British geographer Jay Appleton – share something of
Bachelard’s exploration of ‘miniature’ set against ‘intimate immensity’, an unfolding
sequence that is as much the inspiration for the urban designer as it is the source of
invaluable mental furniture for the small child.

In e Image of the City (1960), Lynch identified the crucial role of the sense of place
that ‘in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there and encourages the
deposit of a memory trace’. is separation of ‘place’ in spirit and idea could, he
argued, be differentiated physically and conceptually, as in edge, path, node, district
and landmark. Lynch’s idea of ‘imageability’, a profound way to seek orientation, led
Jacobs (a great admirer of his work) to point out in e Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961) that ‘only intricacy and vitality of use give, to the parts of a city,
appropriate structure and shape’. By the time e Poetics of Space was available in
English, an entirely compatible discourse was in train on both sides of the Atlantic, a
current of thinking that could draw on Bachelard’s rich literary diet.

T he distant, captured, horizon set against the closely observed and protective (or
protected) has always had currency in landscape design, in past or present,
occident or orient. e borrowed vista, so central to the aesthetics of oriental
gardening and known as the shakkei, reflects Bachelard’s observation that distance
creates miniatures on the horizon. In Recovering Landscape (1999), the US-based
Englishman James Corner, one of the most persuasive of current writers on landscape
and both a practitioner and an academic, cautions readers not to underestimate ‘the
power of the landscape idea’ within the physical space in question, landscape being
both ‘spiritual milieu and cultural image’. at particular combination of spatial sense
and psychic location, Corner argues, distinguishes landscape design definitively from
architecture and painting.

Bachelard’s thinking, subtly adjusted to the communal for these purposes, might
argue for an intense re-examination of the fabric of the city. e historic patterning of
great cities, ever more complex and many-layered versions of themselves, offers ideal
templates. e High Line in New York, in which Corner played an important role
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from instigation to execution, is now almost completed as it approaches Hudson

Yards at Penn Station. Essentially an elevated linear park, cutting north-south
through the strata of the existing city – just as its 1990s predecessor in Paris does
from the Bastille to Austerlitz – it reveals, reminds and confirms the part that the
explorer might play in the city, while the memories linger and shreds of mystery
remain.

One particularly receptive reader of e Poetics of Space is the British sculptor Rachel
Whiteread, her work always transfixed by the polarities of absence and presence. e
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.

As the British scholar Joe Moran writes, viewed from a distance it might have looked
like avant-garde sculpture but ‘closer inspection revealed pockmarks and
imperfections in the minimalist façade, signs of the daily life of the house: soot-
blackened fireplaces, exposed joist ends slightly rotten from damp, the indentations
left by light switches, old plug sockets and door latches’. In that extraordinary
installation, so literal, Whiteread had translated something of Bachelard onto the
actual streets of east London, and from there, through its brief, but widely recorded
and archived existence, passed House into memory.

Gillian Darley is a writer and broadcaster specialising in architecture and landscape. Her
latest book, with co-author David McKie, is Ian Nairn: Words in Place (2013).  She lives in
London.

aeon.co17 October, 2017

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