Boulder, Colorado - M. Gerwing Architects blog posts for M. Gerwing Architects
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Like most of these Architect’s Glossary posts, this one was generated from a misunderstanding between myself and a client. When they expressed a desire for piers instead of posts, my mind went in a very different direction than they had intended. A quick meeting resolved the issue, but started me wondering on the various terms we use for vertical supports of structures
Pronounced with an exaggerated accent on the final "e", "poche'" is a French architectural term for the all the stuff that is inside the walls between spaces. In architectural drawings, it is the stuff blackened in on the plans.
poche 03
John Soane's House Museum in London
For typical construction where all the walls are about the same thickness and both sides run parallel to each other, poche' isn't really a design element. However, back in the days of predominantly stone masonry buildings, the thickness of stone walls gave them a relative presence that allowed for their manipulation as architectural entities.
poche 04
The simplest treatment of poche' and the base cause of the term’s use is when architects describe carving into a wall to create a niche. In those cases they may describe using the poche' space of the building. In a sense, it is carving into the "solid" mass of the wall space even though in modern construction this space of the wall is certainly not stone or solid mass.
poche 01
Baroque plans are especially rich in their interesting manipulation of poche' to create geometrically shaped rooms. The resultant wall shapes between rooms, the poche', takes on a presence that is as "shaped" as the rooms and certainly more interesting than simply the space between two wall surfaces.
