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The Poetics of Space is a 1957 novel by French architect and design theorist Gaston Bachelard. It combines the phenomenologist school of philosophy that was popular in mid-twentieth century with architectural theory. The book focuses on descriptions of architecture in poetry, and concludes that no actual space can satisfy the poetic imagination. Rather than trying to create living spaces that do so, we should instead try to create as good a space as possible for people while acknowledging our limitations.

Bachelard gives context for the school of thought that dominated architecture at his time. He notes that contemporary architects, informed by modernism in other fields, were using classical forms (such as pillars and arches) to derive new abstractions for use as building blocks for architectural sites. Bachelard accuses this school of thought of eschewing lived experience in favor of abstraction. He points out examples of bleak buildings with sophisticated symbolism that alienate people from their houses and distract them from aesthetic form.

Bachelard’s main argument is that houses are not just boxes. He argues that a house should be well lived in and reflect the owner’s lifestyle. He believes that using simple geometric shapes as a design method isn’t sustainable because it doesn’t change with the times. For example, people have different ways of life now than they did hundreds of years ago when classical designs were created. Bachelard also rejects self-evident design concepts and criticizes historical power from classic architecture which has been abstracted into building blocks for new buildings today. Instead he advocates surpassing knowledge by bringing one’s imagination back to the site of lived experience.

According to Bachelard, the house is a place where people unconsciously live. Because of this, he argues that architects should use it as their primary tool for understanding the human imagination.

Bachelard then systematically dismantles the conception of a house that is prevalent in his time. He starts by surveying rooms typically found in houses, such as attics and cellars. He argues that there are two poles (attic and cellar) because of which a concept of inner movement presides both in human minds and their domestic lives. Further, he says that objects like dressers symbolize storage of secret information because they have the same function as animal dens, bird nests, shells from sea creatures etc., where people store things too.

Bachelard argues that the arrangement of space is crucial because it influences how one thinks and behaves. He says that imagination is humanity’s greatest power because it allows us to adjust our thinking and behavior by using lived experience. Bachelard uses quotes from poets to support his argument, drawing formal comparisons between language, mind, and physical form in order to tie them together with his earlier explication of a highly regular epistemological construct of a household space.

Ultimately, Bachelard’s ideal house is not attainable in the same way that there can be no “final” human being. Instead, it is a continuous process of examining one’s contingent and mutable relationship to phenomenology stirred by the feedback loop of human consciousness. Therefore, we should avoid conventional forms for the sake of sophistication and instead examine the lived space as a critically important artifact of, and instrument for, the future of human thought.