Friday, February 20, 2009

House and Universe

A house that stands in my heart
My cathedral of silence
Every morning recaptured in dream
Every evening abandoned
A house covered with dawn
Open to the winds of my youth.

The idea I took from this passage in Bachelard is that when you love a space so much, it takes on this form in your mind that continues to shape itself and remain constant throughout your dreams and memory.

"a room that grew buoyant and, little by little, expanded into the vast stretches of travel"
-Jean Laroche

Is a house just an object or something more? It has depth, personality, purpose, strength, compassion, protection, among many other qualities. At what point can an object expand past its form and function to become a part of our being?

"I never saw this strange dwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appeared to my child's eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connect the two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentary form. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me, the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremonious slowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiral movement, in the darkness of which we advanced like the blood in our veins."

Another passage I found interesting was the relationship between size and function. According to Bachelard, "to sleep well we do not ned to sleep in a large room, and to work well we do not have to work in a den. But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both.

Is this true of design? Some of my best work comes from meditating of the space itself. Silently contemplating and moving throughout the space in my mind. Having the ability to mold and shape walls, alter color, and move furniture in one second. I don't need a certain area to do this in, it can happen anywhere. But does this really relate to Bachelard's passage? What was he really try to say here?

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