White Light Black Shadow. Louis Kahn. Conversations With Students.Pdf

Building Dwelling Thinking

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Building Dwelling Thinking
by Martin Heidegger
from Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New
York, 1971.
In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does
not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venturein
thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building
back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:
1. What is it to dwell?
2. How does building belong to dwelling?
I
We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former,
dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is adwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power
stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are
built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling.
That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck
driver is at home on the highway, but he does nothave his shelter there; the working woman is at
home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in
the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet
does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today's housing
shortage even this much is reassuring andto the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter;
today's houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun,
but-do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings
that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man's
dwelling. Thus dwelling would inany case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and
building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take
dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the
same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not
merely a means and a way towarddwelling -to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this?
Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and
building?
It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature.
In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and
broadcastingof spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while
in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this
relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in

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16/10/2009

Building Dwelling Thinking

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speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only
as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be
voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.
What, then, does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan,
means to dwell. Thissignifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen,
namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word
Nachbar, neighbor. The neighbor is in Old English the neahgehur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller.
The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs
buri, büren, beuren,...