From an intuitive realization that the exhaustive search for meaning in architecture has reached, in post-modernism, an instrumental fatigue, the work sets to investigate the concept of presence in architecture according to the debate established between Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton in the field of architectural starting in the 1970 s. Frampton s studies about tectonics and critical regionalism, as a critical review of the supremacy of the scenographic in the society of the spectacle in detriment of the experience of the sensitive body, as well as Joseph Rykwert s research on the notion of the primitive shelter in the architectural historiography, offer a possible path to reaffirm presence as defined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: that is, the acknowledgement of architecture as a certain poetics of building, embedded with a specific constructive culture, within an anthropological view which takes body and space as ontological dimensions of man and his environment. Architecture is molded between sky and earth, where man builds his dwelling, suspended between an inherent and oscillating desire to take flight and to sink in the ground, produce of a search for an archetypal house transmitted by tradition in the ritual relation of this man with his cosmology. The theoretical discussion establishes the conceptual basis for the critical analysis of works by Lucio Costa, Lina Bo Bardi, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in which one could identify, each in its own manner, a certain notion of shelter that transcends the historic time in search of a mythical space of building, dwelling, and thinking. Architectures in which tradition and modernity, memory and imagination, body and thought, heaviness and lightness are reunited in an eternal present.