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Hofheide (crematorium) Cousséé Goris Huyghe Architecten 

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Hofheide (crematorium) Cousséé Goris Huyghe Architecten 

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For more than 60 years, French thinker Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, has inspired poets, artists, architects, philosophers ⁠— and daydreamers. Millions of us around the world have spent two years sequestered in our homes, so what does his book about daydreaming and the imagination offer u…

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"Een geheel van beelden die de mensheid bewijs of illusies van stabiliteit geven."

"Het huis is de topografie van ons intieme wezen."

"De reis naar intimiteit wordt netjes opgeroepen door lades, kasten, garderobes en vooral sloten."

"Dat kastje of die lade, met zijn sleutel, wees op een piepkleine, onschatbare mate van privacy, en op het veiligstellen van de persoonlijke ruimte, vooral in overvolle, gemeenschappelijke kamers."

"Plaatsen van hulpeloos wachten worden omgevormd ... tot plaatsen van contemplatie en een samenkomen van herinnering en zelf-ontdekking".

"De 'kastheid' van kinderspeelruimtes; een bibliotheek verstopt onder een trap; een universum van emoties in de hoek."

"Een nest voor te dromen, een schuilplaats voor verbeelding."

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"Life is about thinking and then getting on with living" - Gaston Bachelard

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Researchers found evidence of photosynthesizing microbes in the dark zones of caves. The microbes ... [+]
Getty

Life finds a way. In this case, it's cyanobacteria that can photosynthesize in the dark. caves use far-red light and special versions of chlorophyll to generate energy. This type of light comes just before infrared light on the spectrum. Far-red light is reflected by the cave surfaces, reaching areas that visible light does not.

Researchers based in Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S. studied the microbial communities in four caves in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Light enters the first part of the cave easily-most of the cave entrances are 30 to 90 feet tall, with one cave entrance being about 12 feet tall. The cave openings have existed close to their current form for the last four to nine million years.

The scientists studied the microbes along the gradient of light formed as you move deeper in the cave, from areas with full sunlight to "twilight zones" to deep zones. To take detailed measurements on light levels, they used an irradiance meter to measure the level of photons present. The dark zone begins approximately 165 feet or more inside the caves.

The caves are composed of Capitan limestone, which they discovered reflects near-red light slightly better than visible light. This means near-red light can penetrate slightly further into the cave.

Generally, plants and cyanobacteria rely on chlorophyll a for photosynthesis, which gives plants and phytoplankton blooms their distinctive green color. Chlorophyll d and f are special types that are able to generate energy from the far-red light.

After scraping biofilm off the cave walls, the scientists found chlorophyll d and f were present in all parts of the cave, but were particularly common in the deepest light environments, followed by the twilight zone.

The scientists examined microbes in four caves in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, pictured.
AFP/Getty Images

The microbiome of the deep zones was different than the microbiome of the twilight zone and cave entrances, which were similar to each other. The scientist say the limestone provides a great habitat for the cyanobacteria because of its reflective properties. Other minerals, like calcite, have similar spectral properties and also form other caves, making it likely that cyanobacteria are living in other cave systems.

Since the cave microbes are using different parts of the light spectrum, this is a unique example where light is allowing species to form their own niche, similar to how there are different species as you move up a mountain, tree canopy or water column.

The upcoming study, which will be published in Environmental Microbiology, highlights how caves are a promising natural model system, since conditions are stable and can offer unique insights on photopigments, like chlorophyll.

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It Turns Out You Can Photosynthesize In Dark Caves

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Life finds a way. In this case, it's cyanobacteria that can photosynthesize in the dark. caves use far-red light and special versions of chlorophyll to generate energy. This type of light comes just before infrared light on the spectrum. Far-red light is reflected by the cave surfaces, reaching areas that visible light does not.

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Could there be a more ravishing work of architecture than Casa Malaparte? "A beautiful thing, forged out of a brutal environment," is how architect Simon Jacobsen describes this minimalist plinth of a house, built in 1942 atop a craggy promontory on the island of Capri. "It makes you think of Greta Garbo's famous line, 'I want to be alone.' " Its owner did, by all accounts. Curzio Malaparte was a brash man of letters who fell afoul of Mussolini in 1933 and was exiled to a speck of land in the Mediterranean. Banishment had a paradoxical effect: Upon his release, Malaparte longed for more remoteness and seclusion. After buying a site on Capri's eastern coastline, he had the noted architect Adalberto Libera draw up plans for a home, but later threw them out in favor of his own vision-a stolid, jutting form, with a lyrical windbreak on top and a tapering exterior staircase. "A house like me," Malaparte often said. Today the dwelling is owned by the writer's heirs and most easily seen by boat (or by revisiting Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, in which the roof provides a sunbathing venue for Brigitte Bardot). Interior designer Steven Volpe got a rare private invitation years ago and remembers walking the tortuous footpath, touring the hauntingly spartan rooms-and, most vividly, climbing to the rooftop. "Up there it was dream-like," he recalls. "You feel like you're in heaven."

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The Minimalist Home Design of Capri's Casa Malaparte

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Could there be a more ravishing work of architecture than Casa Malaparte? "A beautiful thing, forged out of a brutal environment," is how architect Simon Jacobsen describes this minimalist plinth of a house, built in 1942 atop a craggy promontory on the island of Capri.

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'Bachelardian' has become cultural shorthand for the lyrical possibilities of conjuring memory from buildings, and it is this book that brought it, and him, to prominence outside France. The first chapter, dealing with 'the house from cellar to garret' might well be all that the student will read, since, unlike the direct and determinist link between ideas of surveillance in Michel Foucault's writings and their roots in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, Bachelard's dependence on poetry, with digressions into botany, Carl Jung and much else, is intriguing but always elliptical. It remains, according to my limited international straw poll across the generations, a book still more often cited than read.

In 1961, Bachelard was interviewed, aged almost 80, at home in his tiny claustrophobic study in Paris. He sits snugly, seemingly shoe-horned into the only available space, between teetering heaps of books piled floor to ceiling, folios to slim pamphlets, the philosopher incarnate, down to his effulgent Socratic beard and unruly white hair. Life, he tells his awed interviewer lightly, is about thinking and then getting on with living. He admits to listening to the radio news every day.

As Foucault said of Bachelard a few years later, his characteristic approach was to avoid all defined hierarchies, any universal judgments: 'He plays against his own culture with his own culture.' He stood apart, separating himself from the mainstream, finding cracks, dissonances, minor phenomena that he could make his own. Poetry of every description was his raw material.

Bachelard's previous work had advanced the theory of epistemological rupture, widely accepted by Foucault and others, in which scientific thought is freed from what had previously constrained or encumbered it. In subtle ways, left to the interpretation of the reader, Bachelard now signalled an equally clean break with the weary sterility of post-war modernism in architecture by giving weight to the unforgettable in the context of the ordinary. He considered that 'inhabited space transcends geometric space' but, characteristically, his words did no more than imply the considerable value of imprinted memory or the trace of meaning.

In the book, he guides us through an actual or imagined home (your choice), its comforts and mysteries, assembled and brought into focus, in a place and at a time undefined except by the limits of our own daydreams, longings and memories - those inner landscapes from which, he said, new worlds can be made. The philosopher evokes an idealised past, places the miniature against the immense, and guides us back into childhood. Once there, at home, he reminds us how we tend to look down the cellar stairs, apprehensively, while gazing upwards, towards the attic, always eager. Uncertainty is set against promise, dark against light. This house is a key to an inner self, 'for childhood is certainly greater than reality'.

Thematically, Bachelard divided the schematic house into a vertical entity and a concentrated one, too: 'a body of images that give mankind proof or illusions of stability'. His use of architectural phenomenology lets the mind loose to make its way, always ready for what might emerge in the process. The house is 'the topography of our intimate being', both the repository of memory and the lodging of the soul - in many ways simply the space in our own heads. He offered no shortcuts or routes of avoidance, since 'the phenomenologist has to pursue every image to the very end'.

After a journey through 'undergrounds of legendary fortified castles ... a cluster of cellars for roots', he thrusts upon his readers, in a quite shocking change of tone and imagery, a complete antithesis, in which his prejudice against urbanity and the apparent expedience of mass-produced housing is laid bare: 'In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes.' These buildings have no 'roots' as he would recognise them, for there are no cellars in skyscrapers:

Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. The different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy.

Further, there is no mediating space; everything becomes mechanistic and 'on every side, intimate living flees'.

In this astonishing and singular outburst, spine-chilling to read after the Grenfell Tower fire in London this June, Bachelard seems to be invoking an extreme vision in which individuals must fend for themselves, society having turned a blind eye to them in their dystopia. There is no other passage in the book that is as graphic, or particular. But he had been struggling, he admits, both with Paris and with insomnia, regaining his equilibrium only by returning to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's treasured evocation of a lamp burning in the window of a hermit's hut, conjured up by the last (or first?) light switched on in the street as we walk home. Now the house can again assume 'powers of protection against the forces that besiege it' before turning into a world of its own.

The journey into intimacy is neatly evoked by drawers, cupboards, wardrobes and above all locks

An elderly man with his heart still in rural France, and a marked provincial accent to prove it, what did the increasingly unfamiliar modern city, its economics and politics, have to offer him? Warning against 'very definitely closed utilitarianism', he refrains from suggesting whether the anomie of the collectivist vision that he depicted was that of a capitalist or a communist society. Such was his seeming innocence, most readers do not even pose the question.

The wellbeing of the warm animal (or human) protected in its nest or cocoon or cottage from the bad weather raging outside is a primitive sense of refuge that we can all share, adult or child. The appeal of a safe haven translates into domestic architecture with such features as the accommodating Arts and Crafts inglenook, seats close by the fire, Frank Lloyd Wright's enduring penchant for an immense fireplace buried at the core of a house, or even, a favourite 1960s touch, the conversation pit - with or without its trademark shagpile carpet. The British writer Ken Worpole suggests that Bachelard's observations apply particularly to recent developments in hospice design, in which, by focusing on the psychologically resonant imagery of the home, the hearth and the kitchen table, the familiar and the reassuring, 'places of helpless waiting are re-fashioned ... as places of contemplation and a gathering-in of memory and self-discovery'.

It is odd that a philosopher who so tenaciously excluded the harsh environments and hard circumstances of the exterior world, in mass culture, politics or architecture, was so welcomed in the modernist late-1960s while writing, essentially, about a nostalgic version of rustic Mediterranean peasant living.

Bachelard shared something of the instincts and preferences demonstrated in graphic form in the American writer and architect Bernard Rudofsky's seminal A rchitecture Without Architects (1964). This book began life as an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, supported by august figures in the contemporary architectural pantheon such as Walter Gropius, Gio Ponti and Kenzo Tange. In celebrating the seductive buildings of 'humaneness', Rudofsky illustrated the 'nearly immutable' qualities of vernacular architecture: its patterning, materials and instinctual planning, how it transmitted memory and accommodated the 'vagaries of climate and the challenge of topography'. It was, in short, everything that modernism was not - for better and for worse.

Earlier, W H Auden had coined the word 'topophilia' when he was writing, surprisingly enough, an admiring introduction to an American edition of John Betjeman's poems Slick but not Streamlined in 1947. Late in life, Auden wrote a set of 15 verses titled Thanksgiving for a Habitat (1960-1964). They were a celebration of domestic contentment in his Austrian cottage, and were structured around the rooms of the house, including 'the Cave of Meaning' (his study), the cellar, the attic, and his bedroom 'the Cave of Nakedness'. In the title poem he ends, happily, writing of 'a place I may go both in and out of'. By then, had the (French-speaking) Auden read Bachelard's journey through a house of memories - such a topophiliac paradise?

By the time that the British architecture critic Peter Reyner Banham wrote his love letter to the south-western desert, Scenes in America Deserta (1982), it was almost inevitable that he would turn to Bachelard for elucidation since he 'has become the most quoted authority on matters spatial in the circles in which I move'. To his disappointment, Banham found the noted thinker 'skimpy and self-defensive' for his purposes, since the only immensity promised, 'a philosophical category of day-dream', was that within oneself - altogether too fuzzy for the chronicler of New Brutalism. Perhaps Banham, his heart so recently captured by the desert, was offended by Bachelard's offhand remark that an immense horizon of sand might be no more than a 'schoolboy's desert, the Sahara to be found in every school atlas'.

The 'cupboardness' of children's play areas; a library tucked beneath some stairs; a universe of emotions in the corner

For all that, Banham's fashionable world of mouldbreaking American architects, notably the postmodern Charles Moore and the theorist Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language (1977), had long been in thrall to Bachelard's book. Moore had strong ideas about the relationship of architecture to history and, beyond the private house, about the design of public space that served to enliven society. As the American critic Alexandra Lange has written, Moore had a particular penchant for leftover domestic spaces: 'nooks, porches, lofts, and shelves designed to create room for collections and hobbies, shelter for different moods, and stages for more intimate conversations'. He referred to them as 'saddlebags' but they were, surely, merely assembled poetic spaces. Or maybe they sit alongside Bachelard's admired Bernard Palissy, the 16th-century architect and landscape gardener whose investigation of fortress-building in nature included a slug that did so from its own saliva and reminded Bachelard of his early days in the natural sciences. Observing that the tiniest details 'increases an object's stature' and, quoting from a dictionary of Christian botany, which exemplified the periwinkle as observed by a 'man with a magnifying glass', Bachelard transported his readers to a 'sensitive point of objectivity'.

Bachelard's earliest Anglophone readers in the fields of architecture and design had been in retreat from formulaic modernism and the backwash of deracination. Gradually the ripples spread. In Space and Learning (2008), the admired Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger gave Bachelard a charming nod when he referred to the 'cupboardness' of small children's play areas: a little library tucked beneath some stairs, the inventive use of available nooks and crannies and everywhere, 'the kangaroo as our ideal' offering safety and sanctuary, the doorknob that is at eye level for a small child, the drawer that harbours treasures, and a universe of emotions in the corner. Following that, Colin Ward, author of The Child in the City (1978) and the most perceptive of British writers on the built environment, celebrated Bachelard's notion of 'experienced reality' within childhood, a vein of rich memory available to be evoked in adulthood.

In his neat phrase 'reading a room', Bachelard encouraged readers to think of some place in their own past: 'You have unlocked a door to daydreaming.' As if in answer to that very personal quest, his description of 'emotional shapes of the spaces inside houses and flats' helpfully reflected Jungian ideas for the Anglo-French feminist writer Michéle Roberts as she aligned textual and spatial strands from diaries in her memoir Paper Houses (2007). Roberts configures her own journey through life as one through the city, moving from space to space, in and out of imagination. She responds to Jungian cellars, subterranean and potentially fearful places, set against attics, light and without menace, which as Bachelard confirmed 'can always efface the fears of night' but which are, essentially, the terrain of the German critic Walter Benjamin. Decades after the apogee of post-modernism and the lingering, often abstruse, arguments around 'critical regionalism', Bachelard's book still offered 'a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining' as John Stilgoe, professor of the history of landscape at Harvard University, wrote in his introduction to the 1994 edition.

The enduring position of The Poetics of Space as a key text sees Bachelard as omnipresent. The Pritzker prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor might have been channelling him in his RIBA Royal Gold Medal address in 2013 as he spoke of architecture shorn of intrusive symbolism and imbued with experience, leading to the ultimate goal, 'to create emotional space'. Emphasising light, materials (involving a sophisticated return to the vernacular, in the sense of the language of the locale) and atmosphere, intensified by remote and particular locations such as the house in south Devon now under construction in the Living Architecture programme, there is a clear confluence between Zumthor's wish to be seen, above all, as an 'architect of place' and Bachelard's subtle and romantic insights.

The approach can also point to an unfurling of levels of meaning and reality within an existing structure. For the architect Biba Dow, of Dow Jones in London, The Poetics of Space long ago became 'my favourite and most essential book on architecture'. Dow and her partner Alun Jones were introduced to Bachelard's writing by Dalibor Vesely, their first-year tutor at the University of Cambridge school of architecture. The poetic approach offered rich possibilities for extracting wider meaning, phenomenology, and the permitted exercise of the imagination. For example, the medieval church of St Mary-at-Lambeth in south London, once almost derelict, now offers a series of discrete spaces in its current life as the Garden Museum, on which Dow Jones worked in two successive phases. A chapel has become a cabinet of curiosity, displaying treasures associated with the great plant-hunter and gardener John Tradescant the Elder, founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, as well as of the original South Lambeth 'Ark' from which it grew. Beyond the outer walls, they have added a 'cloister' in the midst of which lies Tradescant under his exotic carved-chest tomb, a world of curiosity in itself.

It is as much the inspiration for the urban designer as it is the source of invaluable mental furniture for the small child

Less obvious was the intellectual weight of Nikolaus Pevsner celebrating, for example, 'precinctual' or collegiate planning in Oxford. He later thanked Hastings for encouraging his pleasurable diversion into the picturesque, allowing him, so firmly tarred with the modernist brush in the eyes of the world, 'the saving grace of just a little bit of inconsistency'.

Cullen and his colleague Ian Nairn extended the visual analysis that Townscape suggested to a number of US cities in a contribution to Exploding Metropolis (1957) where, alongside the urbanist Jane Jacobs, they succinctly analysed, in word and image, the distinct and identifiable spatial qualities of cities from Austin to San Francisco, New York to Pittsburgh. Townscape and the contemporary exploration of ideas of 'prospect and refuge' - the terms, used widely in landscape theory, are those of the late British geographer Jay Appleton - share something of Bachelard's exploration of 'miniature' set against 'intimate immensity', an unfolding sequence that is as much the inspiration for the urban designer as it is the source of invaluable mental furniture for the small child.

The distant, captured, horizon set against the closely observed and protective (or protected) has always had currency in landscape design, in past or present, occident or orient. The borrowed vista, so central to the aesthetics of oriental gardening and known as the shakkei, reflects Bachelard's observation that distance creates miniatures on the horizon. In Recovering Landscape (1999), the US-based Englishman James Corner, one of the most persuasive of current writers on landscape and both a practitioner and an academic, cautions readers not to underestimate 'the power of the landscape idea ' within the physical space in question, landscape being both 'spiritual milieu and cultural image'. That particular combination of spatial sense and psychic location, Corner argues, distinguishes landscape design definitively from architecture and painting.

Bachelard's thinking, subtly adjusted to the communal for these purposes, might argue for an intense re-examination of the fabric of the city. The historic patterning of great cities, ever more complex and many-layered versions of themselves, offers ideal templates. The High Line in New York, in which Corner played an important role from instigation to execution, is now almost completed as it approaches Hudson Yards at Penn Station. Essentially an elevated linear park, cutting north-south through the strata of the existing city - just as its 1990s predecessor in Paris does from the Bastille to Austerlitz - it reveals, reminds and confirms the part that the explorer might play in the city, while the memories linger and shreds of mystery remain.

As the British scholar Joe Moran writes, viewed from a distance it might have looked like avant-garde sculpture but 'closer inspection revealed pockmarks and imperfections in the minimalist façade, signs of the daily life of the house: soot-blackened fireplaces, exposed joist ends slightly rotten from damp, the indentations left by light switches, old plug sockets and door latches'. In that extraordinary installation, so literal, Whiteread had translated something of Bachelard onto the actual streets of east London, and from there, through its brief, but widely recorded and archived existence, passed House into memory.

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

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In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard created a philosophy of at-homeness, rich in emotion and memory