Friday, March 27, 2009

Poetics of Space chapters10 Phenomenology of Roundness



"He had been told that life was beautiful. No! Life is round." Van Gogh
Life is a continuum made up of natural cycles. Bachelard uses the example of a bird on page 237. The bird takes branches, twigs, and moss to create its home,, molding them into a spherical shape which becomes its nest. It is this encompassing nest that protects the round offspring. The birds then give back by reseeding the earth to complete the cycle in which they first started. “One can neither see, nor even imagine, a higher degree of unity.” P.237 Bachelard also speaks of the world as a whole. “The round cry of round being makes the sky round like a cupola . And in the rounded landscape, everything seems to be in repose.” He puts forth the idea that roundness encompasses our daydreams. “For a painter, a tree is composed in its roundness.” P.239 “The world is round around the round being.”p.240 This idea relates to a permanence by illustrating our existence. The circle is a never ending process that either allows us to change our environment or for our environment to change us. By talking about these processes in the natural sense Bachelard alludes to humanities role in our built environment, and how the architecture of that environment affects the universe as a whole.

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