Bachelard was one of those unre defining intellectuals, were you a philosopher, poet, epistemologist, physicist, professor of French literature?But there is one thing that stands out above all this: his poetic thinking.
In fact, one of his most famous texts is The Poetics of Space. This book draws particular attention to his sensitive analysis of the spaces of a house.
- There are very few great intellectuals who have dedicated the the task of deepening reflection on the spaces of a house.
- This seems to be a subject of architecture.
- Or perhaps sociology.
- But Gaston Bachelard transforms the subject into a wonderful poetic reflection.
- It defines this work as a state-of-the-art analysis.
- Which.
- In any case.
- Will be full of extreme sensitivity.
“Because the house is our space in the world. This is our primary universe. It is actually a cosmos. ? -Gaston Bachelard-
Referring to the spaces of a house, Bachelard himself says: “It seems that the image of the house is the topography of our most intimate being. “That’s what it looks like at home. Outer space as a reflection of the inner world.
Bachelard points out that the main value of a house is protection, the spaces of the house are living spaces, so they have little to do with geometry or architecture, each place and each object has a memory and a meaning, given by the experiences lived. And the experiences of the house are the same as the experiences of our interior space.
For this wonderful French philosopher, when you learn to live in a house, you also learn to live inside, the spaces of the house are in us, as we, the writer compares the house with images of a nest or a shell With this means that the house is symbolically the place where life is created and also the place where it finds refuge.
In this way, he makes an analogy between the home and the mother’s uterus. In fact, she takes the house herself as a symbolic extension of the mother’s role. Home is like a mother who welcomes us, protects us and overcomes our fears. It is also a scene of dreams and dreams, memories and memories.
Bachelard says there’s a house and a dream house. The house is our first house. The one in which we spent our first years remains etched in our minds forever. All the other houses in which we will live throughout our lives will have something of this primitive direction, not so much in its form, but in its atmosphere.
At the same time, we have always built a dream house in our imagination, we also inhabit the spaces of this dream house, we draw it in our minds and we will live difficult times, this direction has none of the flaws of our royalty. Couple. He belongs to the world of dreams and stays with us as an ideal. We’ll never leave him.
“Intimacy needs a nest,” Bachelard says
Bachelard refers to the corners of the house as more meaningful spaces, one way or another each person chooses a small space of their house to live as much as possible, it is almost always our room, but it can also be another room, a place in the garden, a studio, etc.
That’s where we’ll be present most often. These corners speak a lot about our relationship, not only with others, but mainly with ourselves and with life.
In the spaces of the house there is also a set of objects that end up being inhabitants of this particular place. Bachelard gives special meaning to cabinets, safes and boxes, which symbolically are the secret places, the place where treasures are kept. They are also a metaphor for what is carefully stored in a corner of our mind.
Opening a closet, safe or box will always produce a certain emotion, besides, in a way, it will always be a journey that goes from the outside end to the intimate, going from normal, from day to day, to what you often have. sacred connotation.
Those that people keep in these spaces allow a reading of life, especially those that are locked and need keys to open. All the spaces of the house and all the objects that make up it speak of its inhabitants. What does your house say about you?