ADAM K ON SPACE & SOUND

THE POETICS OF SPACE

I have a fuzzy recollection of a summer school course I took as a college student, entitled, “Architecture As Archetype”. It was taught by a young visiting teacher named Jeff Orberdorfer. I have no idea where Jeff went off to after his “visitation”, but I do know that he grew up in a place called Levittown – one of the first post-war planned communities in America. He made it a point to tell us where he hailed from on the first day of class. Was this a matter of pride or pity (more about Levittown below) or simply part of the prelude to the course’s core subject matter: “Space”?

In some academic circles, as well as in the boardrooms of some new homebuilders, Levittown has an archetypical status of its own. It’s the master of all master-planned communities, and is often billed as the ideal American suburb. A series of similarly designed cost-engineered “spaces” repeated over and over, producing a checkerboard grid-like space as seen from the heavens. I believe Jeff used the term “rectilinear” to describe the full spatial effect. From Jeff’s humanistic point of view, Levittown’s architectural style was as “American as apple pie”, but without any “taste”, whatsoever. Thinking back on it all, I wonder if this lack of “aesthetic space” in Jeff’s Levittonian childhood was what compelled him to take up the study and teaching of Architecture? It certainly produced a critical frame of reference for him – and for all of his students.

One of the required readings in Jeff’s course was a book by Gaston Bachelard called, “The Poetics of Space”. Now, here’s where my memory really starts to fail. I can’t remember anything about the book that matched the alluring and quite frankly, brilliance of its title.

If not altogether empty, my recollection of Bachelard’s work is that of a dry, barren, pedagogical space. Perhaps something was lost in translation? French was Bachalard’s mother tongue. More likely though, I was simply a student at a loss – meaning the book was beyond my level of comprehension. Anyway, today his book on space is packed in a box that’s stored in the bowels of my garage. (A case of poetic justice?)

Enter Ro’s On Space & Sound – 2 “Soundscapes”. Here (for me) is the beginning of a book that’s worthy of the title, “The Poetics of Space”. Ro takes sound, memory and other stimuli, and creates a space where life’s richness unfolds, collides, dovetails and blends into a beautiful aesthetic. The pastiche is an ode to how space can be experienced, as well as how it can be thought about. As a result, I not only want to read more from Rohini the “sonic-flaneur”, but also want to re-read Bachelard’s book. If for no other reason than to possibly clear up some of the fuzziness that now exists in the space between by ears.