Building, Thinking, Dwelling, Exterminating. Heidegger and the Auschwitz’s architecture

Abstract

Our work tries to review critically the famous conference Building, Dwelling, Thinking, proposed by Martin Heidegger in 1951. This text is one of the main references in the connections between the philosophy of the German author and the architectonical discourses. However, it still has not been adequately analyzed from a contrary perspective, for instance, introducing against the texts several facts connected with the darkest side of the nazi project. We will start discussing some of the major ideas in the text, as the relations between the Lebensraum project and the connections between Dwelling and caring (Sorge). After that, we will analyze Auschwitz as the exact inversion of the Heidegger´s Dwelling process based on four elements: Land, Sky, The Holy Ones and the Mortal Ones.