what remains . . .

Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a hugely influential book for most architects.  My enthusiasm for it has led me to buy and give away many copies to other architects, friends and clients.  I have long thought that the companion text would be to examine how we inhabit spaces over time, the time of the space treated in a phenomenological approach.

Certainly the remains of houses long-ago abandoned have a strong pull on us.  The melancholia of architecture is perhaps what buildings do best.

photograph by Mark Gerwing, somewhere outside of Lexington, KY

~ by mgerwing on December 9, 2008.