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Summary: Beautiful
Review: Bachelard's classic is a beautiful contribution to phenomenology. It does not so much "talk" about space and place, but rather gives the reader a thoughtful experience of the subjectivities and meanings of space. For example, Bachelard presents poetic interpretations of enclosures, inside/outside, and other spatial phenomemon while applying it to such entities as the nest, the shell, the corner, the drawer, etc. A work to savor, slowly.
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Summary: A beautiful lyrical explorative journey
Review: How do we associate emotional relationship to intimate spaces? This is the basic premise of this book. Gaston Bachelard unleashes our imaginations as he helps us to explore these feelings with an journey through our house - a sacred place that holds dear to most of us, a place that we grew up, a place that is full of memories both from our childhood and our present existence.From the cellar to the attic, Bachelard also shows that these fantasies are not only common to all of us, but also can be viewed in a greater context and reflected in literary works, poetries, philosophies, etc. Also, these kinds of primal response also can be reflected in our relationship with natural spatial objects like nests and shells. It also deals with the metaphysical question of outside and inside. This is a book that is full of philosophical treasures and wonders!
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Summary: it's"more enriching to imagine than experience"this book
Review: I came across mention of this book in Alexander Cockburn's otherwise excellent list of the century's greatest works of non-fiction in translation. Alex, you gave me a bum steer! The jacket of this book and the reviews already posted here at Amazon led me to believe that it would contain some insight into the how people experience places. The introduction promises an exploration of "the impact of human habitation on geometrical form and the impact of form upon human inhabitants." It further offers "methods of assaying existing form [and] imaging finer textures and concatenations." If this is what you are looking for (and aren't we all?) I strongly suggest you take a look at Christopher Alexander's seminal "A Pattern Language". APL is everything TPOS is not: a systematic, well researched, clearly and succinctly written, common-sense attempt to synthesize and analyze the best (and worst) practices in planning and architecture from around the globe. A Pattern Language is a deeply affecting analysis of the impact of the physical form on the quality of our families and communities. The Poetics of Space is a vague, discursive, and frustrating piece of literary criticism that strays far afield from questions of space. Bachelard uses bits of trite ecstatic poetry ("My love enveloped the universe") as springboards for a series of swan dives into a frustrating critical sludge of dreary pseudo-revelation("we only have to imagine it for our souls to be at peace"), paradox("a phenomenology without phemomena"), and contrarian inanity("why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?" "the problem is not to examine men, but images."; "beware of the privileges of evidence"). To be fair, the book does contain few isolated bits of evocative imprecision, and his real-world examples can be genuinely resonant. (I particularly liked the bit about bird's nests.) On balance, though, Bachelard gives turbid french criticism a bad name.
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Summary: bachelard y los arquetipos poéticos
Review: La Poética del espacio proporciona a los estudiosos de la poesía una clave insuperable de análisis. La imaginaión poética del espacio se aplica a las escalas y los grados de intimidad, alcanzando el estatus del aqruetipo y el símbolo.
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Summary: Heraclitus with a Fountain Pen
Review: Owing to its elusive origin, we would do well to read Bachelard's The Poetics of Space as a kind of voluptuous epilogue of the absent image. The pages glisten to the simmer of echoes, Proustean recollections entwine with a phenomenology of the immediate and the vast corresponds with the intimate like distant lighthouses resonating each others beam. Flickering the pages with scholarly fervour, naïve with the melancholy of the insignificant, and impatient with reveries with the absent will only lead to vexation since here one has to allow the words to diffuse with their natural lucidity. Battered and laced in a forgotten history, it travels in the arms of poets whose voice chortles to express itself (Heraclitus is a distant allegory buried beneath a tree). Thrown upon the floor, pencil-sketched like the lithographs of Alfred Kubin, gargled, chewed, and spat out: the pages rustle, the breeze stirs, the binding cracks. Gaston Bachelard: suddenly ' as though by revelation ' we are led amongst the house, inspecting its corners for crevices of inspiration and comfort. Indoors, secluded from the ontology of the outside and with only distant murmur of the viola for company, clutching our sketchbooks we lose ourselves within the intimate space. A philosophy of the kitchen table, a psychology of the terrace unfolds. A conjuration of the nostalgic but a distillation of the present, the expression is passive, mild, and pendulous: it is the Grand Canal at dawn viewed from a secret bedroom within the Doges Palace. Knowing that the day will pass without having to be disturbed, we are able to extend our reveries beyond the immediate confines. Form the vantage point of age, which Bachelard was attuned to, one can glance down beside themselves, beside their memories, allowing the absent images to unfold like a kaleidoscope of foreign apparitions. The house dances with passion, the garden a landscape of pastoral splendour, the cemetery an ocean of the unwanted, the park a palace of the unknown ' the cottage a lugubrious enclave into which only chimerical reverberations emerge. Bachelard thus writes to himself, writes to purge himself of this painful, convoluted beauty that torments him: 'And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral' thus he writes with devastating clarity. A benign temperament, had his nature been more attuned to the negative, then such reflections would have led not to passive descriptions but to anguished expressionism ' a task which perhaps will be fulfilled by another author...
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Summary: A beautiful and thought -provoking book
Review: The Poetics of Space is one of the most inspiring books I have ever read. It is to be taken slowly - the author's primary idea is that people crave spaces that inspire them to daydream. The style of the book is one that inspires daydreams itself; you will suddenly find that you have placed the book in your lap and you were off daydreaming! Poetics of Space is a methodical, carefully argued book which tells us that we read spaces like we read a book. There is a distinct psychology to each type of space - attics, cellars, the forest, and nests are just some of the spaces examined. The author was chair of the Philosophy department at the Sorbonne. For most of his life, he examined the philosophy of science, but in his later years he turned to artistic reverie as his main subject. The book is written with thought, love, and passion and is a tour-de-force. Highly recommended to those who enjoy poetry, philosophy, architecture or art.
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Summary: A deep, inspiring book that changed how I look at things
Review: The Poetics of Space is one of the most inspiring books I have ever read. It is to be taken slowly - the author's primary idea is that people crave spaces that inspire them to daydream. The style of the book is one that inspires daydreams itself; you will suddenly find that you have placed the book in your lap and you were off daydreaming! Poetics of Space is a methodical, carefully argued book which tells us that we read spaces like we read a book. There is a distinct psychology to each type of space - attics, cellars, the forest, and nests are just some of the spaces examined. The author was chair of the Philosophy department at the Sorbonne. For most of his life, he examined the philosophy of science, but in his later years he turned to artistic reverie as his main subject. The book is written with thought, love, and passion and is a tour-de-force. Highly recommended to those who enjoy poetry, philosophy, architecture or art.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Exploration of Spaces, Psychological and Real
Review: This is a must-read for ANYONE interested in the arts, architecture, home buying, renovation, interior designing. Along with his in-depth exploration of how spaces work within our minds, he leads to beautiful poetic passages that will leave you breathless no matter how well read you are. After reading this book you will no longer think of the world around you as a vacuum to be rushed through. Everywhere has meaning.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Exploration of Spaces, Psychological and Real
Review: This is a must-read for ANYONE interested in the arts, architecture, home buying, renovation, interior designing. Along with his in-depth exploration of how spaces work within our minds, he leads to beautiful poetic passages that will leave you breathless no matter how well read you are. After reading this book you will no longer think of the world around you as a vacuum to be rushed through. Everywhere has meaning.
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Summary: Eye-Opening Book for Those Interested in Place or Language
Review: Though you may not immediately think that there is a connection between language and the places where you live and pass through, your sense of your surroundings and of language itself will be transformed after you read Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space." Bachelard argues that language--especially poetry--can reveal hidden aspects of our experience of space, especially of our home space. For example, he considers how common phrases such as "go up to the attic" and "go down to the basement" are revelatory of our typical sense that stairs to an attic are stairs one ascends, while stairs to the basement are stairs one descends--in spite of the fact that both sets of stairs must be equally ascended and descended. As he does with other such observations, Bachelard extends his observation regarding the directionality of different staircases into a discussion of how the attic and basement hold different roles in our daily and imaginary lives. In addition to exploring how we experience space and place, Bachelard equally attends to the way in which language can function either as a daily and common means of communication or as a site of new and creative insight; roughly speaking, he argues that poetry happens when the motions of language itself open us up to a new way of seeing or understanding something. By reading this beautifully written and engaging book, you will likely come to understand or see anew experiences from childhood through adulthood that pertain to places where your have lived, grown up, felt comfortable or alienated, had a feeling of wonder or fear, etc. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the experience of place or space, in language and what it can reveal to us, or in what counts as poetry rather than as common everyday language.
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