Building Dwelling Thinking

Author: Martin Heidegger
Year: 1971 (from Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter)
Source type: chapter/essay
Raw file: raw/chapters/heidegger-building-dwelling-thinking.md

Summary

Heidegger's foundational phenomenological essay asks what it is to dwell and how building belongs to dwelling. He argues, etymologically and philosophically, that building is in itself already dwelling (the old word bauen = to dwell, to be), and that dwelling is "the manner in which mortals are on the earth." Genuine building is "letting-dwell," gathering the fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, mortals) into things like the bridge, which are locations that give rise to spaces. Against the modern reduction of space to spatium/extension, space "receives its being from locations." The real plight of dwelling is not a lack of houses but man's homelessness and forgetting of dwelling.

Key Claims

• Building is dwelling: "We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers." To be human is "to be on the earth as a mortal"; dwelling is "the basic character of human being."
• Dwelling as sparing/preserving: dwelling (from wunian: to be at peace, in the "free") is "to set at peace, to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature"; "the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving."
• The fourfold: dwelling preserves earth, sky, divinities, and mortals in their simple oneness — "mortals dwell in that they save the earth, receive the sky, await the divinities, initiate themselves into death."
• Building as letting-dwell and thing-gathering: the bridge is a thing that "gathers the fourfold" and, as a location, makes room for a site. "Spaces receive their being from locations and not from 'space'" — against spatium (interval) and extensio (abstract extension).
• The Black Forest farm as exemplar: a dwelling "built ... by the dwelling of peasants," ordered by the fourfold — "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."
• The plight of dwelling is homelessness: "the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses"; it lies in man no longer thinking the nature of dwelling. "What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?"

Connections

Concepts: Dwelling · Atmosphere
Authors: Martin Heidegger · Christian Norberg-Schulz
Debates: (modernity-and-dwelling)
Related source notes: Architectural Atmospheres (Borch) · The Big Rethink Part 4 (Buchanan)

Direct Quotes

"We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers."

"The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving."

"Spaces receive their being from locations and not from 'space'."

"Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."

"The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell."

Open Questions

• Can Heidegger's "letting-dwell" and the fourfold be operationalized for architectural critique, or does it remain a pre-modern, nostalgic counter-model (cf. Heynen's dialectic of programmatic and pastoral modernism)?
• How does the critique of finite/abstract space (spatium/extensio) intersect with the financialized, brandable "space" of the neoliberal metropolis?