Phenomenology of Landscape and Place

Martin Heidegger's essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" (Bauen Wohnen Denken), delivered as a lecture at a 1951 Darmstadt colloquium on architecture and later published, develops "dwelling" (Wohnen) as the fundamental way human beings exist upon the earth, prior to and more basic than the mere physical occupation of space. Heidegger articulates dwelling through the structure he calls the "fourfold" (das Geviert) — earth, sky, divinities, and mortals — and illustrates it with the example of an old Black Forest farmhouse, whose siting, orientation, and construction, he argues, let the fourfold gather and let dwelling happen in a way modern, merely functional building typically fails to achieve.