Heidegger’s Hut offers a full architectural analysis of a very simple structure, the philosopher’s retreat in Todtnauberg. As Simon Sadler says in his foreword, “This is the most thorough architectural ‘crit’ of a hut ever set down” (ix). Of course the hut would never have attracted such attention were it not Heidegger’s. The oral tradition that accompanied Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world (and perhaps elsewhere) involved rumors of the philosopher working at a remote mountain hut. Well before the 1980s, when the question of Heidegger’s Nazism became unavoidable for scholars, the legend that accompanied him was that of the reclusive, solitary thinker, alone with his thoughts of Being (a word we eventually learned not to capitalize, and which in the end Heidegger defaced or erased, writing it as Sein crossed out by an X). In the 1960s and 1970s, as the first great wave of English translations of Heidegger’s works were appearing, readers found resonances of this legend in essays like “Building Dwelling Thinking” with its thick description of a simple peasant hut as it would have been built two hundred years ago, including the wind-sheltered placement on the mountainside, proximity to a spring, pitched roof to protect from...