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.
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.
The simplest treatment of poche’ and the base cause of the terms 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…
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