Gaston Bachelard was a chemist and physicist before he became a philosopher of space, sensation, phenomenology, science and imagination. In addition to The Poetics of Space, he also wrote The New Scientific Spirit, Dialectics of Duration, and Intuition of the Instant, among others. His writing combines literary analysis and formal philosophy with meditations on emotion, sensation, experience, and feeling. The Poetics of Space was published in French in 1958.
The experience of reading The Poetics of Space is one of wandering through your house with a fresh perspective and deeper attention to interiors vs. exteriors, images vs. intimacies, and shapes vs. sizes. As a visual representation, I made a video that follows the order of the essays and attempts to apply Bachelard's ideas very literally to the personal spaces of my own house and objects.
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
The Contents
Below are some of my favorite and most representative quotes from each of these essays. It is interesting to see how the images deepen as they get repeated, as well as to observe the general progression from concrete to abstract (discussed more below).
House
"For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty." (note the introduction of coming ideas--the universe and the corner)
House and Universe
"Thus, an immense cosmic house is a potential of every dream of houses. Winds radiate from its center and gulls fly from its windows. A house that is as dynamic as this allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his house." ('' intimate immensity)
Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes
"Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe?...Every poet of furniture knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe's inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody."
Nests
"A nest—and this we understand right away—is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security. Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind?" (return to safety of the House)
Shells
"The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration. And since the inhabitant of a shell can amaze us, the imagination will soon make amazing creatures, more amazing than reality, issue from the shell." (taken out of context, this essay provides interesting insights into hermit crab essays)
Corners
"Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house." (safety of the Nest, but in intentional solitude)
Miniatures
"Miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical freshness; it allows us to be world conscious at slight risk. And how restful this exercise on a dominated world can be! For miniature rests us without ever putting us to sleep. Here the imagination is both vigilant and content."
Immense Intimacy
"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming." (in addition to this eyes-shut solitude, Bachelard finds intimate immensity in the desert)
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
"But how many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of Doors!V For the door is an entire cosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depth of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open." (the shut door recalls the locked wardrobe)
The Phenomenology of Roundness
"The round cry of round being makes the sky round like a cupola. And in this rounded landscape, everything seems to be in repose. The round being propagates its roundness, together with the calm of all roundness. And for a dreamer of words, what calm there is in the word round. How peacefully it makes one's mouth, lips, and the being of breath become round." (though this essay bookends the 'House', it is also the outlier essay in some ways, as it deals more with shape and life than space)
Repetitions and Resonances
These chapters are all structurally similar; each essay is related in numbered sections (typically 5-10 sections per essay). Each section usually deals with a distinctive 'take' or interpretation on the essay's theme; frequently, sections begin with a quote or passage from poetry or literature and then analyze and expand on the metaphors and images found therein.
Bachelard's ideal reader (or so it seems to me) is frequently referred to as 'the dreamer' or 'the dreamer of words'; he often writes sarcastically about and against traditional philosophers and psychoanalysts. Bachelard himself would like to be or be seen as a dreamer of words, a philosopher of poetry (or poet of philosophy, potentially), and though the writing here is formal and analytical, it is also often whimsical and lyrical.
In thinking about the experience of space and architecture, Bachelard returns over and over again to a few central ideas and images:
The devision of interiors vs. exteriors
The secrecy and safety of enclosure
The intimacy of solitude and loneliness
The poetic potentials of spatial imagery
The experience of dreams and dreamworlds
The meaninglessness of differentiating reality/unreality
Thus the sections feel more like extended riffs on a theme or themes, pieces of one continuous work divided up mostly for organization and clarity's sake.
Order and Arrangement
Arrangement-wise, there is an interesting resistance to what would seem to me to be the more obvious order, arranging 'space' essays from largest space to smallest one, or the reverse of that (per Perec's Species of Spaces, a comparable text which moves from the page--the bed--the bedroom--the apartment--etc, mimicking an outward zoom). Here, the moves are more unexpected, though still linked: Drawers to Nests, Corners to Miniatures.
A part of this resistance to simple outward movement may come from the more nontraditional or less concretized spaces that Bachelard discusses; Miniatures and Immensity do have obvious 'sizes', in relation to each other, but essays like The Phenomenology of Roundness and even House and Universe cannot be tracked so neatly on a scale of size.
Nor do Bachelard's spaces deal in real, physical spaces as Perec's do. Each one of these essays (including the more traditional House section) meditates on architectural space as it stands in the realm of vocabulary, poetry, metaphor, dream, etc.
If there is a macro movement at work, it takes place in these ideas, moving from simple to complex, the literal (house) to the abstract ('life is round'). In beginning with the house, Bachelard welcomes us into complex philosophies of space through the space most familiar to us, and complicates our understanding of space as he goes.
On a more micro level, many of the essays are arranged in pairs that are the most similar, most opposite, or both. House and House and Universe discuss interior and exterior space of the same object; House and Universe next to Drawers draws our attention again to interior vs. exterior, and what 'enclosed space' feels like; Nests and Shells conquer the metaphors of natural homes; Miniatures and Intimate Immensity stand as obvious opposites, though reveal themselves to be deeply similar on closer inspection (both extremes of scale; and whereas the Miniature accentuates immensity, the immense can have the opposite effect, and feel more intimate). The Dialectics of Inside and Outside, finally, revisits interior vs. exterior space at the most abstract level and paints a picture of division and doorway, whereas Roundness deals abstractly with wholeness and continuity. In many ways, the last two essays work in parallel with the first two, House and Roundness working as concrete/abstract bookends of the same idea (ditto House and Universe and Outside and Inside).