Bachelardian Dreams as Future Architecture

Bachelardian Dreams as Future Architecture is an entry into the AI Architecture Competition, 2022, is based on Gaston Bachelard’s seminal book, The Poetics of Space, 1958.

The project investigates how a future architecture can respond to the traditional phenomenology of house, memory, and place. Bachelard’s phenomenological poetic descriptions are reimagined as architectural forms and spaces connected to places, created through Mid-Journey AI prompting. This project looks at how new technologies, such as Mid-Journey AI can be used as part of the concept process in architecture.

Five quotes were selected from The Poetics of Space. Each quote explored a different theme. The quotes were used as part of a prompting in Mid-Journey to create a series of architectural images. These images illustrate the ability of Mid-Journey to convey emotion of 20th century philosophical ideas as architectural forms and spaces. Themes included:

• The house as transcendental,
• The schema of memory,
•  The phenomenology of home,
• The quality of thresholds,
• The house as place.

The project was submitted as part of ArchiHacks 2022 AI competition and was awarded an Honorable Mention by the judges. Quotes included are extracts of The Poetics Space, by Gaston Bachelard, 1958, first published by Presses Universitaires de France. Copyright belongs to the publishers and the authors estate.

The house as transcendental

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

The schema of memory

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

The phenomenology of home

“And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream, itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heart-warming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm, and cool, always comforting.”

The quality of thresholds

“How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

The house as place

“Our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty. Authors of books on “the humble home” often mention this feature of the poetics of space. But this mention is much too succinct. Finding little to describe in the humble home, they spend little time there; so, they describe it as it actually is, without really experiencing its primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs to all, rich and poor alike, if they are willing to dream. But our adult life is so dispossessed of the essential benefits, its anthropocosmic ties have become so slack, that we do not feel their first attachment in the universe of the house.”

Typology: 
Competition, 2022.

Award:
Honorable Mention.

Location:
Speculative.