Ning-Hui Chung

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is a key phenomenological study on how intimate spaces—houses, rooms, corners, drawers, and nests—shape memory and imagination. Rather than viewing architecture as function, Bachelard explores how people inhabit space and how childhood memories dwell within it. For him, the house is not just shelter but a vessel for dreams, solitude, and recollection. Through poetic writing, he shows how small things like shells or tiny objects can contain vast inner worlds, linking the material to the symbolic.

This book deeply relates to my research on memory, childhood, and small-scale sculpture. Bachelard’s vision suggests that sculpture can act as an “intimate architecture,” where scale and material evoke hidden or repressed memories. His concept of “intimate immensity” reveals how miniature forms can open expansive emotional spaces. From a feminist lens, the domestic settings he describes can also be seen as gendered environments—places where women’s histories persist yet remain overlooked. The book helps me understand how memory and space intertwine, offering a poetic foundation for thinking about sculpture as a vessel of memory and trauma.

#phenomenology #memory #architecture #intimacy #poeticspace

Written on: 27 July 2025