The Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard, Maria Jolas (Translator), John R. Stilgoe (Foreword by)

ISBN: 0807064734
ISBN-13: 9780807064733
Format: Paperback, 241pp
Publisher: Orion Press, 1964; reprint Beacon Press, 1994

Paperback, 1964 (original), 1994 (reprint)
Online Price: $16.00
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces.

"A magical book ... A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced—and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard."
-from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe

FROM THE CRITICS

Harvard Design Magazine
"Three or four decades ago, a book entitled 'The Poetics of Space' could hardly fail to stir the architectural imagination.

First published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard's philosophical meditation on oneiric space appeared at a moment when phenomenology and the pursuit of symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture seemed to open fertile ground within the desiccated culture of late modernism. 'We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms,' Bachelard wrote in a chapter entitled House and Universe. 'A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.'

In lyrical chapters on the 'topography of our intimate being' — of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its vertical polarity of cellar and attic — he undertook a systematic study, or 'topoanalysis,' of the 'space we love.' Although Bachelard was specifically concerned with the psychodynamics of the literary image, architects saw in his excavation of the spatial imaginary a counter to both techno-scientific positivism and abstract formalism, as well as an alternative to the schematicism of the other emerging intellectual tendency of the day, structuralism."

Excerpt of review by Joan Ockman, history and theory teacher at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Copyright Representations/Misrepresentations, Number 6, Fall 1998

Amazon.com
This is a deep, magical, densely captivating book about space, our homes, how we live in them, and how dwellings and space affect us; it is as much a book of philosophy as a work of serious literature. It requires careful, preferably leisurely reading, with the possibility of moments to pause and digest and re-read the words. It will change the way you look at your home and your life, providing a deeper, more insightful relationship with the spaces you occupy.

Publishers Weekly
French phenomenologist Bachelard's classic study of the psychological affects of domestic space.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.