“I JUST NEED MY SPACE RIGHT NOW”

June 6, 2025

Uncategorized

Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and the Lost Architecture of Dreaming:

In 1958, French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote The Poetics of Space, a surreal meditation on the house as a space of infinite imagination. In his exploration of space, he left no crevice, nook, or corner unturned, emphasizing their symbolic weight as a reflection of our inner human state. As a reader, it has been a book that feels more like a mirror than a storytelling device, despite its poetic language, that you pass and come back to abruptly like seeing your reflection in the street. Its abstract nature and the development of Bachelard’s lived experience did not make it an easy read, to say the least, but once you step back and accept the illusory dream state that he constantly references, it becomes clear that he’s cooking.

Rather than treating the architecture of the “home” as structure, Bachelard writes it as symbol and sensation: The house is not just shelter, but a layered psychic map. The attic becomes the realm of thought; the cellar, of fear and the unconscious. Corners, drawers, closets — even shells and nests — all become places where identity hides, rests, and unfolds.

Throughout his chapters, he weaves poetry, philosophy, and memory to suggest that home is where we first learn to daydream. He writes, “In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, it becomes a cell of intimacy and rationality.” Indicating the home to be a place where the self finds scale and safety — a place to exist without performing.

In 2020, the idea of the home became the nexus of the public psyche because no one could leave their homes. Those who had a place to reside were trapped, and those without faced the crushing reality of a world that does not help the people who need it the most.

5 years later, in 2025, with rising housing insecurity, the commodification of private life, and the disappearance of public spaces, we have to ask: What happens to our inner self when that space is limited and for some non existent.

The Youth Are Not Alright: Housing Is a Ghost:

Looking around at agemates, Gen Z, and even millennials, the home isn’t a given — it’s an increasingly inaccessible privilege, and the numbers reflect that

In 2023, just 38.2% of Americans under 35 owned a home.

In New York City, homeownership is even lower, around 32%.

Over 54% of adults aged 18–24 in the U.S. still live with their parents. In NYC, that jumps to over 60% for ages 18–29.

I know first-generation grads with fresh out of school salaries that took their parents and grandparents years reach. Yet they are unable to acquire what people could 20 years ago. I saw some guy on Twitter say he rented out a 2-bedroom by Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill for 750 a month in 2007??? We’ve been bamboozled.

So while Bachelard imagines the home as a place of retreat and reflection, many young people are stuck in childhood bedrooms, roommates’ couches, overpriced boxes, or unstable leases — spaces that offer shelter, but not soul.

Home as Content: Intimacy in the Age of Exposure:

Almost despite the scarcity of home, and the intimacy it holds, the aesthetics of the home are now more visible than ever. In February of this year, I visited the object-oriented exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. From October 15th, 2024, to March 30^th, 2025 the exhibition titled, Private Lives: from the Bedroom to Social Media, examined changing concepts of the intimate through 470 objects that reflect what was in the home from the 19^th century to today.

These objects reflect the shift in the relationship between public and private life through objects that encompass both spheres of phenomenology. Objects like the 18^th century bordalue. An instrument that women tucked under their skirts to access as a urinal when needed out in public, reflect the public shift to valuing hygiene and privacy beyond the confines of the home. My personal favorites, were the eye popping almost futuristic designs of Pop and Radical design andthe Postmodernism movement of the mid-20^th century. These which were artistic responses to consumerism and counterculture. Objects like Verner Panton’s Living Tower, or the collections of the Italian Memphis group’s whose furniture looked more like sculptures than seating arrangements.

That being said the timeline drawn from these objects concludes with objects tied to social media and surveillance, including selfies, anti–facial-recognition masks by Ewa Nowak, and even drones, “underscoring how our private self is now formatted, monitored, and often vulnerable.” Intimacy in any context can be fuel for the soul, so what happens to us when the first harbinger of that dynamic, the “home,” is disrupted by the housing insecurity and technological mediation that exists today?

EXPOSED INTERIORS: WHEN HOME BECOMES PERFORMANCE:

Gaston Bachelard teaches us to see the home not only as architecture, but also as memory, imagination, and inner life. In The Poetics of Space, he writes that the house is where the self finds scale and safety—a place for dreaming, not displaying. But today, for many of us, especially Gen Z in cities like New York, the home has become both unstable and overexposed.

The exhibition Private Lives: From the Bedroom to Social Media at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (2024–2025) puts this on full display—literally.

From chamber pots, to bidets to drones, conversation pits, and even sex toys, the show traces how the meaning of intimacy has shifted. Bedrooms have changed from secluded nests to curated sets for content creation. Bathrooms once a literal after thought in the planning of homes are now aestheticized, designed for mirrors and morning routines to be shared online. A diary is no longer private, it’s a feed and means of securing publicity that ultimately can provide social and fiscal capital

The home, once a space to disappear into, has become a space to be seen in.

But here’s the disconnect: while the exhibit reveals how our idea of privacy has changed, the reality for many young people is even starker. Homeownership rates are down, and more than half of young adults live with their parents or in unstable rentals. We’re performing stability inside spaces we can barely hold onto. The backdrop is cozy, but the foundation is cracked.

This curated domesticity—our bookshelves, plants, and beds made just right for the camera—masks a truth: many of us are building an identity in spaces that aren’t truly ours.

There’s no attic to think in. No cellar to sink into. No corner that’s really private. As Bachelard would put it, without space to withdraw, the soul has nowhere to expand.

In a way, Private Lives becomes a phantom story. Not just about how intimacy has changed, but about what we’ve lost: the home as a sanctuary, not a showroom.

And so we scroll. And post. And rearrange. Hoping that through performance, we can reclaim something real. But maybe it’s time we ask harder questions about who gets to dream, who gets to nest, and what kind of space a generation needs to simply be.

We can put the doomerism down though. There are still ways to escape and build genuine intimacy with yourself and those around you. Community is key and with more research into nightclubs, design anthropology, and the now infamous “third space” I want to find solutions to feed the emptiness that creeps up no matter what space people inhabit.

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