How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy | Aeon Essays

sometimes cultivating a natural pace isn’t just about the time you dedicate to a project, but also the context in which the work is completed. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, we shouldn’t underestimate the ability of our surroundings to transform our cognitive reality. In discussing the role of a home, for

A true house is something you can return to when the adventure of thought and action has made you leave it and almost forget about it.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wal

Christopher Alexander was known for his theories on bringing humanity into architecture. He believed everyone possessed the ability to create and design a space that he called alive. His book, Pattern language, is based on core belief that people should design their own communities. Observation is that some of the best places in the world were desi

when we speak of being ‘moved’ by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.