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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