Essays on the language of architecture and the architecture of language.

"In the 18th century, culture is no longer produced in palaces and monasteries, but in the countryside and rural areas. Goethe's famous farmhouse, the landscapes of Turner and Constable, Rousseau's sensual reverie, the Black Forest, are nothing but points of a total and almost massive immersion in nature, an immersion in the landscape that was to be the last historically. The romantic ideal of the farmhouse, "the dwelling of the peasants," as Heidegger would say, is also the last trace of an ancient conception of dwelling that the new times are fundamentally overturning. A dwelling that still haunts our imagination today. The Eagles family, treehouses, camping in nature, the children of apartments who continue to draw huts with wooden fences in their sketches when asked to design their own house, bear a trace that seems to resist strongly. The formal resistance of a mental memory, the deepest memory according to Bachelard, which always captivates when it appears."

From the contents of the book: The heterotopia of the hut, In the Black Forest, The solitary dwelling, On the edge of a cliff, The dialectic of the familiar, Kafka's burrow, At Walden Lake, Of Philimon and Vavkida, a single thrush.