ABSTRACT
“Theories of the hut” and “theories of dwelling” are here considered in a single theoretical appraisal. Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise tracks a long line of theory, beginning with Vitruvius, holding that all architecture traces back to a primordial hut. But Rykwert himself concedes that a hut must be read into the text of Genesis; there was no-hut-at-all in that original Paradise. This chapter proposes that the absence of an originary hut is in fact the key to experiences of dwelling, defined by Christian Norberg-Schulz as experiencing “a small chosen world of our own.” Experiences of a small chosen world of our own blend artifice and nature into a single seamless union. (And so experiences of dwelling are instances of symmetria/sacrament.) Erasure of artificial huts, then, is the basis for experiences of dwelling. In this vein, experiences of dwelling are what happens along-the-way in a vastly extended journey between the original pastoral paradise, at one pole, to the ultimate urban paradise of New Jerusalem, on the other. The sacramental zone, then, is revealed as not static, but directional.
