University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

This is a posthumous collection of essays by Bachelard, the 20th century's foremost philosopher of the "material imagination." My favorite essay is "The Cosmos of Iron" about the Basque artist Chillida, who "dreams dreams of iron, he draws with iron, sees with iron." As an architect, I appreciate Bachelard's descriptions and interpretations of material objects because they so strikingly deviate from the technical and economic perspectives which dominate our culture. Neither perspective is adequate to understand works, such as Chillida's, "dedicated to the glory of matter."