Heidegger - Dwelling

Mortals dwell in that they save the earth - taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing.  Saving does not only snatch something from a danger.  To save really means to set something free into its own presencing.  To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out.  Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.

Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky.  They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do no turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest...

The nature of building is letting dwell.  Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces.  Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.  Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants.  Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinites and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.  It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring.  It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against storms of the long winter nights.  It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the "tree of the dead" - for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum - and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time.  A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.  Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build...

We are attempting to trace in thought the nature of dwelling.  The next step on this path would be the question: what is the state of dwelling in our precarious age?  On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason.  Nor is there just talk; there is action too.  We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise.  However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses.  The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers.  The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.  What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?  Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer.  Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling...


Martin Heidegger, Bauen Wohnen Denken - Building Dwelling Thinking; 1954.


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