This thesis reframes meaning and interpretation in architecture as a function of poiesis and the poetic and begins to explore the spatial implications therein.

Much has been made of narrative in architecture. We see it deployed as a way of building fictions, of projecting the future, and of imagining what we design as it might one day exist in the world. On some level, projecting narrative is as fundamental to architecture as drawing itself. But within all fictions is the urge for what can be called the lyric moment. This is the point where the prosaic transcends narrative as such and achieves something more fantastic than just “what happens next.” This project hopes to uncover the way that the poetic is involved with cultural production in visual and spatial modes.

Narrative provides details of a world, but the poetic is what convinces us of it. And if the use of narrative in architecture is relatively widely discussed, what of the lyric moment? Through surveying and analyzing some of the ways language and space have been addressed historically, we can begin understanding notions of poiesis (creation) and the poetic as deeply entrenched in architectural and spatial discourse.

The project hopes to demystify the term poetic and its associates and to offer a fuller understanding of what forces tend to conjure it, and to propose that a spatial conception of poiesis, the poetic, and the lyric moment is a critical and scarcely addressed step towards understanding the modes of cultural production undertaken by architects.