A little privacy, some movement of air and a gentle conversation between architecture and nature - this is all I want for my cottage. Possibly, a place to retreat into the mind. Henry David Thoreau's house on Walden Pond, a tiny affair, suggests a thinking solitude, not the despair that can come from living among millions in the city. Le Corbusier's "Cabanon" in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin overlooks the Mediterranean in the south of France. A rough pine-board cabin lined with plywood, now restored, was rudely attached to a snack bar; this is where Corb designed new cities, social condensers and modern mansions for the clients who would indulge him. Martin Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest mountains of southern Germany is where, in the early 1920s, without electricity or running water, he wrote his groundbreaking phenomenological work titled Being and Time, a work that resisted the high priests of modernism and articulated, instead, a crisis of dwelling.

¶ 3:13 PM