Nooks and crannies, shells and doorknobs, nests and peasant huts; all glisten, glisten to serve as metaphors to a transcendental inquiry into our ‘first universe,’ as Gaston Bachelard puts it: The nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining – an abode of poetry… a delicious exploration of the house – the heart of Bachelard’s seminal work, The Poetics of Space.

Upon exposure to this title, one might immediately be struck by the oddity of such an attribution of the word poetry to the word space.

For upon the perception of this word poetry the familiar and lyrical echoes taken from Shakespeare’s, Hamlet may be summoned: 

     To be, or not to be, that is the question:

     Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

     The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

     Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

     And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

     No more; and by a sleep to say we end

     The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

 We may be tempted to go on a voyage through Homer’s, The Odyssey:

  Tell me, o muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide

     after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit

     and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was

     acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save

     his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he

     could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer

     folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god

  prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all

     these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may

know them.

Or perhaps Dante’s, Inferno may be inferred in some minds:

 

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound

I still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—

Merely to think of it renews the fear.

These masterpieces; these expressive dispositions, have power to speak to our innermost and innate being. They move us in the deepest parts of our soul and affect and inspire us in ways we cannot quite comprehend. Bachelard’s seminal work claims that space – the home, has equal effect. He demonstrates this by taking us on a lyrical expedition, demonstrating how the physical space, consciousness and poetry are interlinked.

He determines this most aptly by “taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul,” since, “Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves… my aim is clear, I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.” He tells us, “The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.”

 “Poets will help us to discover...” Bachelard tells us, “within ourselves such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space.” He believes we do this through an oneiric experience, oneiric – which is just a big word for dreaming. “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” 

 Doctor Jordan B Peterson, a clinical psychologist, reflects on the importance and the correlation between our dreams and poetry, when he says, “Poetry, like dreams is the birthplace of thought… we’re all embedded in the dream. When you go to sleep and you dream; you’re embedded in your imagination. If you’re forbidden to dream, if you’re deprived of your dreams, you will lose your mind… you have to dream. You have to enter that realm of incoherent imagination and possibility in order to maintain your sanity… and this has been demonstrated on animals, but in humans too. Poetry exists on the border between the dream and fully articulated wakefulness… it’s the place where the image of the dream meets the articulated speech of full consciousness.” 

 The home is both dwelling place and manifestation, in Bachelard’s view; for the facilitation of this important mental faculty.

 Like a small animal in a shell, or a bird in a nest; Bachelard calls us to view the home as a refuge; a magical sphere that encapsulates us. Since the dawn of a global pandemic, forced into isolation within our homes, how many of us have stopped to reflect and come to view our homes as a poetic expression of ourselves, our dreams and our souls? How many of us have come to view the home as a source of refuge and of peace? How many of us find joy in the most mundane and somewhat onerous attributes of a home? If Bachelard were with us today, he would invite us to look at this situation through an encouraging lens, to see this as an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves and incite an oneiric experience through our homes.

To reference Bachelard: “Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is "cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty meta-physics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.”

 Considered one of the most poetic architects of the twentieth-century, Luis Barragán, in my opinion, truly embodies this notion brought forward by Bachelard’s presuppositions. Barragán confesses that ‘it is only among architects that he feels himself to be a stranger. Not for any anti-intellectual bias, but because he believes their education has estranged them from their own emotional and intuitive capacities.’ Perhaps it could be that the formal education of contemporary architecture reduces the architect and designer to mere convention, removing all embodied application that would lead one to trek down the poetic stretch - the poetic stretch that is deeply embedded in the phenomenology of being.

 In an interview given in 1962,  Barragán professed, “I believe that much of what we have been doing over the last fifteen or twenty years is essentially academic, with no real exploration of new forms; it has been an ‘international’ architecture. Take, for example, the enormous use of plate windows, which are not totally suited for our – or any other – climate. They deprive our buildings of intimacy, they deprive our buildings the effects of intimacy, the effects of shadow and atmosphere.”

 I think it would be fair to say that we might relate to Barragán’s predicament in this regard. Are we truly creating our homes with this embodied knowledge in mind, or are we following trends and styles and forgetting altogether our deep metaphysical and existential need to dwell within a space that facilitates the poetic nature of our being? – in other words, our deep necessity for the oneiric experience.

 Barragán developed a decent catalogue of work that expressed this notion, but none more profoundly than in his most famous work, a UNESCO heritage listed site and the home and studio that he lived and worked in for some forty odd years, Casa Barragan. 

Upon entry of Casa Barragán, visitors often describe how they are immediately struck with a feeling of stillness; there seems to be a monastery presence. Visitors express how they are instantly moved and these feelings only intensify as one meanders through the house - a journey meant to give an experience of spaces as he intended; poetically.

He masters the idea of intimacy in some spaces and then reveals a vastness of space in others. His play on light; using the sun through orientation to illuminate or cast shadows; or his deliberate placement of artificial light in other parts. His play on colour and texture and form and the way in which he frames certain views; such as the garden from the dining space or the sky in the upper terrace. Most notably, is his sensitivity to domesticity. His spaces are unpretentious and bellow in an inaudible way, the beauty of the simple domestic nature of the home: from a small desk to a chair to the placement of a simple fruit bowl. 

 Another aspect that is often cited by his visitors is the acoustic quality of the space. He seems to master the architecture of silence and guests seemingly become permeated with this immaterial architectural member. In his Pritzker prize speech, he speaks about this when he acknowledges, ‘Silence. In the gardens and homes designed by me, I have always endeavoured to allow for placid murmur of silence, and in my fountains, silence sings.’

All these considerations, in my view, are what Barragán used to achieve, as Bachelard describes, a space to facilitate the oneiric experience; a poetical space. Jill Magid, an artist and now a tremendous Barragán enthusiast, when visited the home, describes the affection she developed for Barragán and his work. She says, “it happened really organically and almost surprisingly… my visceral experience was being in the house and all I wanted to do was sleep there and write.” Barragán himself, in describing his approach says, “I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.”

But no account perfectly depicts the description of such a space, other than Louis Kahn’s observation, when he visited the house in 1969. He said, “His house is not merely a house but House itself. Anyone could feel at home. Its material is traditional; its character eternal.”

Although I have not yet visited this wonderful space, and it is definitely on the bucket list, from the limitations that can be experienced through photography, the feeling seems to be emanating. Whilst it is difficult to fully articulate the essence of what a poetics of space may inscribe, it is my hope that this short blog post might at least provide an introduction into how one might perceive a home in a poetic sense.

We have been in lock down for a time, forced to remain within the confines of our homes and who knows when we will be able to go back to a normal way of living. But in the meantime, my hope is that we might perceive our homes in a different light, that if we are professionals; that we might design the home so as to fully articulate this philosophy and create Home, as Kahn describes it. And for potential clients, that they might request for this essence when approaching a professional on a brief. I would also invite my readers to consider, as Bachelard did, during these times of uncertainty, to use the imaginative faculty, to regard the home as a bosom, a refuge, a place that seeks to protect and nurture – a place that heartens the oneiric experience.

 I will finish off and leave you with this exquisite extract about what a home is from Bachelard in his book, The Poetics of Space:

 “…how we inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialectics of life, how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’…

 … 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 word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty…“

Below are some images captured by Rich Stapleton that hopefully can provide some insight into the magical and poetic realm of Casa Barragán.