But where do we humans get our information about the nature of dwelling and poetry? Where does man generally get the claim to arrive at the nature of something? Man can make such a claim only where he receives it. He receives it from the telling of language.5

          He goes on to quote the line from Friedrich Holderlin’s poem that gave the essay its title, which implies a certain “merit” in the physical acts of buildings. He compares this with the kind of construction involved in the cultivation of plants and the making of objects, but concludes that these are merely a consequence of the process of dwelling and not the “grounding” of dwelling itself. For this, man must look to poetry as the “authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling”6 which carries the history of dwelling within it, as well as the “projects” of future possibilities for building:

         Man is capable of such building only if he already builds in the sense of the poetic taking of measure. Authentic building occurs so far as there are poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling.7

         By way of a contribution towards this poetic background to the practice of architecture, Heidegger himself provided some intriguing insights in his earlier essay on the nature of dwelling. He describes the primordial character of human Being in terms of its location on the surface of the earth, which he develops into a notion called the “four-fold”, which provides the background to the act of building. This four-way structure results from the way a building inhabits the interface of earth and sky – the implication of being on the earth is that of also being under the sky – while the second two terms cover divinities and mortals, which are more obscure and less clearly developed.

early writing its existentialist orientation. This view, where the world is experienced before the mind describes it in concepts – where “existence precedes essence”, according to the famous existentialist slogan – is contradicted to a certain extent by the direction of Heidegger’s later thinking, when he moves back through a philosophy of language towards a more essentialist orientation.

         What later writers called the Kebre or “turning” in Heidegger’s work, occurs around the time of World War 2 during a difficult period in the philosopher’s career. As Rector of Freiburg University in the period before the war, he failed to oppose the rise of National Socialism and this tarnished his reputation. In the late 1940s he was left without a formal teaching position, but he used this time to carry out further research and this deeply affected his later thinking. The shift in Heidegger’s thought is the “turn” to language as a privileged realm, as we saw in his discussion of art and poetry, described in Chapter 2. More specifically, in terms of architecture, his interest was likewise centred on language, as he describes in the famous essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”. The order of priority suggested by the title – that one builds first, in order to dwell – is actually reversed in Heidegger’s thinking, such that one must learn to dwell in order to build. This argument is based on the idea that we have “forgotten” what dwelling means, in the same way that Western philosophy has forgotten, or neglected, the true meaning of Being. In order to retrieve this original meaning Heidegger looks back into the history of language, to a time before Plato’s troublesome division between the world of experience and the realm of ideal forms. In this pre-Socratic world, as it has since been referred to, Heidegger discerns a more authentic language, where a natural correspondence is supposed to have existed between ideas and words.

         Through a series of etymologies based on the Greek and German languages, he uncovers a number of interrelations between the words connected with building and ideas about the meaning of being. In another essay from 1951, “Poetically Man Dwells”, he gives a further account of the importance of the history that is “sedimented” within language:

in Heidegger’s writing into an architectural dimension, when he describes the understanding of a room as more than simply the space between four walls. As “equipment for residing” it implies a series of activities and related objects, such as the ink-stand, pen, paper, blotting pad, lamp, desk, chair and window that provide the example of the writer’s study. These objects form an “arrangement” and provide a context for our understanding, where each item implies the others which are also necessary to the larger function of the room.

         As a means of understanding buildings in terms of their activities, this logic is then extended into the natural domain, as Heidegger goes on to describe the ways in which equipment provides information about the outside world. A railway station with its covered platforms takes account of the local climate, and the use of street lighting tells us something about the variation in daylight through the year. Along with these environmental qualities there is the user, whose presence is also implied by the item of equipment, as the interpretation can be extended from the activity towards the person taking part in it.

         While on one hand the above analysis sets the two kinds of knowledge – action and contemplation – in opposition to each other, Heidegger is also keen to establish the necessary interaction between these two ways of engaging with the world:

         ‘Practical’ behavior is not ‘atheoretical’ in the sense of ‘sightlessness’. The way it differs from theoretical behavior does not lie simply in the fact that in theoretical behavior one observes, while in practical behavior one acts, and that action must employ theoretical cognition if it is not to remain blind; for the fact that observation is a kind of concern is just as primordial as the fact that action has its own kind of sight.4

         This notion of an “embodied” knowledge which comes from engaging with the world of things forms the basis for contemplation in the projection of future possibilities for action. This emphasis on the inter-relation between action and contemplation is what gives Heidegger’s

4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, New York, 1962, p 99.

writes, one’s most immediate audience is not one’s own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one’s predecessors.”32 “No real writer ever wanted to be contemporary”, Jorge Luis Borges argues in the same vain.33 This view opens another essential perspective on the significance and role of remembrance; all creative work is collaboration with the past and with the wisdom of tradition. “Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom [the wisdom of the novel], which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line work”, Milan Kundera argues.34 The same observation is equally true of architecture; great buildings are fruits of the wisdom of architecture, they are products of a collaboration, often unconscious, with our great predecessors as much as they are works of their individual creators. Only works that are in vital and respectful dialogue with their past possess the mental capacity to survive time and stimulate viewers, listeners, readers, and occupants in the future.

Looking through a window is a profound architectural encounter rather than a visual design of the window itself. Caspar David Friedrich, “Frau am Fenster”. 1822