2 Frank Lloyd Wright –“Fallingwater”, House for Edgar Kaufmann, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1935-39. (Jonathan Hale)

         Architecture is a vital penetration of a multi-layered, mysterious, evolved and structured reality. Again and again it demands recognition of the genius loci out of which it grows. Architecture is no longer a two-dimensional impression but is becoming experience of corporeal and spatial reality, achieved by walking around and entering into … The subject-object relationship has been done away with … Architecture is the enveloping and sheltering the individual, and hence a fulfillment and a deepening.18

         This reintroduction of a phenomenological dimension into our interpretation of the built environment became significant in the reassessments of modernism that took place in the following decades.

1 Frank Lloyd Wright –“Fallingwater”, House for Edgar Kaufmann, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1935-39: Fireplace and wine kettle.(Jonathan Hale)

towards an awareness of these environmental qualities, if we consider a building like Fallingwater, the famous house by Frank Lloyd Wright. Completed in 1936 for the Pittsburgh Edgar Kaufmann, the house was built as a weekend retreat, an escape from the pressures of city life. The site on Bear Run with its dramatic waterfall and rocky outcrops was well-known to the client’s family from their summer weekends at a nearby cabin. They would often picnic along the river, around a campfire on the rock ledges, and it was this experience of the natural landscape that became the basis for Wright’s design. The living room fireplace is built on an existing boulder, which is left as an “out-crop” rising up through the floor, and the spherical wine-kettle which is mounted above it also recalls the experience of outdoor cooking. The house itself provides an echo of the landscape, in its cantilevered ledges and continuous glazing – as though the terraces of the waterfall have been simply inhabited, like a series of cave-dwellings that might have existed already. This process of “concentration” of the site’s existing characteristics is perhaps best evidenced in the way the building establishes different relationships with water. From the entrance pool with its running fountain, to the open staircase suspended out over the river, the whole building provides an experience of water, even down to the stone flooring which recalls the river bed. This theme of the four elements creates a poetic image of the natural landscape, a kind of three-dimensional cosmic diagram in the sense that Bachelard would have appreciated. This building could also be read in terms of Heidegger’s example of the way a bridge affects its surroundings, but for a direct application of these latter ideas we must look to other writers on architectural theory.

The Phenomenon of Place 

In 1960 an early warning was sounded against the limitations of functionalism in architecture, in the manifesto written by two German architects and published in the Berlin journal Der Monat:

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

Towards an Architecture of the Body 

One writer who provides a stepping-stone between the realms of philosophy and architecture also demonstrates the above dilemma in the development of his own career. The French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard began as a philosopher of science, publishing a series of books on contemporary scientific issues during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1938 he published a book called The Psychoanalysis of Fire, which inaugurated a new direction in his works and puzzled most of his former readers. The reason for the consternation was Bachelard’s apparent rejection of his own principles – instead of scientific methods of analysis, he now seemed to be more interested in poetry. In fact, Bachelard set out to answer the problem Perez-Gomez tried to answer (described above) that while science might provide precise definitions of things, these no longer seemed to mean anything in terms of our everyday experience. The notion that we understand things in terms of images, or by “telling stories” about the world, became the major theme of Bachelard’s subsequent research, which crossed over effectively into literary criticism. This first work set out the literary sources for our understanding of the phenomenon of fire, particularly the symbolic significance of different uses of fire and the type of associations that went along with it. This book formed the first part of a whole series on a similar theme, where Bachelard considered each of the traditional four elements in turn and their potential to inspire imagination and reflection. With books on air and water and a further two on different aspects of the earth, he provided substantial evidence of the kind of knowledge still expressed in art, with its direct appeal to the imagination. It was the depth of meaning in the poetic image that held the key to Bachelard’s interest, and the pursued this theme into the realm of architecture with his 1958 book The Poetics of Space.

         This work develops a range of ideas based on the poetic qualities of intimate spaces, beginning with the house and its associated imagery as described in literary sources. In the early chapters the house is considered in its idealized form, as both a hermit’s hut and an image of the