Poché

Definition

Poché is a Beaux-Arts architectural term for the space in the walls — the past participle of the verb pocher (to pocket, to pouch). What architects are taught to draw as solid by filling the area between rooms with black ink, suggesting a monolithic wall, is "in fact entirely hollow and void." Poché is the domain of services (columns, beams, staircases, corridors, secret passages for servants) and, in books and movies, the domain from which ghosts and monsters enter living spaces. In Spuybroek's theory, poché is the architectural name for the "thickened" or "doubled" space that appropriation produces — the hollow zone between presence and absence where things flicker. The smallest pockets of poché act as "portals that give access to the largest playing fields."

Key Thinkers

• lars spuybroek — develops poché as the architectural name for the thickened space of appropriation; the hollow wall as portal between interior and gameboard.

Related Concepts

• appropriation — poché is the spatial product of appropriation; the thickened zone where things are drawn in and suspended from their original meaning.
• dwelling — poché as the architectural condition of dwelling's "thickening."
• everyday life — the invisible zone of habitual inhabitation; "it lies in the nature of architecture to disappear during the act of appropriation."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — the primary source; poché as the hollow, thickened wall-space of appropriation.
• Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Lefebvre 2014) — Lefebvre's porous space as the expansion-form of the thickening that poché names.

Open Questions

• Can poché be reclaimed as a design concept — not just a Beaux-Arts convention but a deliberate production of thickened, inhabitable wall-space?
• How does the Beaux-Arts poché (the space of services and servants) relate to its phenomenological refiguring as the space of ghosts, daydreams, and portals?