Down to Earth: Martin Heidegger, Le Corbusier, and the Question of Dwelling, Essentially

Abstract

The philosopher Martin Heidegger and the architect Le Corbusier — two towering 20th-century public figures — each built for themselves small, sturdily crafted timber cabins well away from the cities of their busy everyday lives, to which they would repair annually to work in solitude and draw sustenance from their landscapes and locally archaic cultures. This article presents a close tandem reading of the architecture and inhabitation of Heidegger’s staunchly traditional Hutte on the upper slope of a deep-green Schwarzwald valley and Le Corbusier’s modern-ascetic Cabanon overlooking the beckoning azure waters of the Cote d’Azur. It draws on archival drawings and photographs, published and private statements, writings by others, and direct personal observations made in situ. These two unassuming yet inordinately significant dwellings seek to counter the overwhelming modern condition of ‘technicity’ by descending to the chthonic claims of the natural conditions, in alliance with Heidegger’s post-war essays co-locating building and dwelling, and Le Corbusier’s Le poeme de l’angle droit that indexes a descent down to the question of dwelling, essentially.