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page110from Building Ideas
cosmos, and this is later developed in a
series of comparisons to other ideas of comfort and enclosure. Descriptions of
animal dwellings such as shells and nests, along with items of furniture like
chests and wardrobes, are all examined for their imaginative potential in
expressing the different qualities of the “ideal” home. The implication of
Bachelard’s examples, which are drawn in the main from poetry and fiction, is
that a meaningful environment is one that will itself inspire a kind of poetic
reverie. This activity of reflection by the solitary dreamer on the meaningful
qualities of one’s physical environment provides an interesting counterpart to
Heidegger’s notion that dwelling must always remain “worthy of questioning”.16
At the same time his collection of resonant images could be seen as part of a
design approach based on the memory of places. As the architect Peter Zumthor
has written in a recent collection of essays:
When
I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a
building, if I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous
qualities, images of other places start to invade this process of precise
observation: images of places that I know and that once impressed me, images of
ordinary or special places that I carry with me as inner visions of specific
moods and qualities; images of architectural situations, which emanate from the
world of art, of films, theatre or literature.17
Bachelard’s
project of providing an “archive” for the activities of the “material
imagination” provides a new way of understanding the kind of knowledge that
architecture might express. As we no longer experience life in the abstract
languages that have been produced by the physical sciences, we might consider
Bachelard’s use of the four elements as providing a phenomenological
understanding of our environment. We can see how a work of architecture might
contribute
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