De la Sota, Dwelling in Dr. Arce, Madrid (1955)

The house, in particular the private house, constitutes the central program of modern architectural production. Bearing the civilizing values of 19th-century culture, the house came into the 20th at a moment of the history of the West that saw the consolidation of the notion of private space and domestic comfort. In a lecture given in Darmstadt in 1951, titled ‘Bauen, Wohnen, Denken,’ Martin Heidegger related the term ‘to build’ with the verb ‘to be’ and the action of being, concluding that “inhabiting is the fundamental trace of being, the condition of the life of mortals.” Readdressing the idea of ‘construction’ and seeking to identify the true ‘being,’ his critique reflected the failure of the materialist solution of rationalism, opening a new path for reassessing the unique, magical, creative aspects of the architectural project...