Conch to Scaffold: Semper and Morris on Dwelling

In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger evokes the image of a 200-year-old farmhouse in the Black Forest as the last form of authentic dwelling. When contemplating the possibility of true dwelling, there is a strong tendency to romanticize what once was, to yearn for a premodern condition. Amid a fresh wave of such yearnings in the present day, it is useful to revisit the polemical writings of two 19th-century critics: the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper and the British artist, designer, and activist William Morris. Confronted with mature industrial capitalism, both registered the crisis of modern dwelling and traced its structural causes with remarkable clarity. Semper brought into relief the reality of contemporary speculative housing and the transformation of the house into a commodity, while Morris extended this critique, exposing the impact of unchecked development on the environment at large. For both, the question of what it means to dwell could not be disentangled from the driving forces of profit that were reshaping not only the design and construction of houses but also the very ways they were inhabited. Reading this work today, it feels strikingly contemporary: the forces driving construction remain much the same, as does the nostalgic yearning for a past imagined as still “whole,” when dwelling and building were one and integrated.