Back in college, I was quite taken with Gaston Bachelard's book, "The Poetics of Space." In places it was dense and obscure--after all, it was written by a French philosopher. It was too dense for me. What I was really taken with was the title, and phrases like, "The phenomenology of roundness."
The book came to mind again as I took in the exhibits by Lead Pencil Studio at the Lawrimore Project recently (see below for my posting about it). So I pulled "Poetics" off the shelf and found Bachelard talking about the house as a space: "The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer,the house allows the dreamer to dream in peace." He goes on to say, "I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind."
I tend not to notice "space" explicitly. Maybe architects do, but I just move through spaces--the kitchen, the office, the basement--with more attention to content that configuration. But I'm intrigued to hear others--like architects--talk about space as if were a thing, an object.
And then I came across an entirely different way to think about space. In Stephen Bachelor's "Living
with the Devil, a Meditation on Good and Evil" he says, "Buddhist philosophers see space differently. They define it as the absence of resistance. The space in a room is understood as the absence of anything that would prevent one moving around in it. ...Rather than being the place where things happen, space is the absence of what prevents things from happening."
"This dynamic concept of space also applies to a path. A footpath is a space because it offers no resistance to placing one front in front of the other. Its space allows one to move without hindrance. Space is thus a metaphor for freedom."
Interesting thoughts... Cheers.
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