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You think philosophy is difficult enough, but I can tell you it is nothing

compared to the difficulty of being a good architect.


L.W., Conversations with Wittgenstein [and M. Drury]
Gregory R. Deady
Wittgenstein Seminar
10.18.2013
Wittgenstein the Architect:
An Inquiry into a System of Value in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and Haus Wittgenstein
Within a few years after Tractatus was first published in 1921, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, with famed architect Paul Engelmann, began work on
designing what became known as Haus Wittgenstein for his sister,
Margarethe. It would become the home for her and her family, barracks for
Russian soldiers, an eyesore to be threatened with demolition, and
eventually a Bulgarian cultural center. One could speculate why the
engineering student turned soldier turned philosopher came to take on such
a task (it became a 27-room mansion), which is certainly an interesting
question, but my focus presently is on the connection between what he
designed and his early philosophical work. During the time he worked with
Engelmann 1926 to 1928 Wittgenstein already experienced fame for his
Tractatus, especially among the Vienna Circle, with whom he had been
corresponding in soon after its first publication. He was very much involved
with philosophical work, and it's a fair assumption that it is reflected in his
design process (also, he tacitly admits this). It is important to note that

examining Wittgenstein's early philosophy through the design of this house


is not entirely a novel approach; in fact, I will call upon an article later in this
by David Olson Pook which aims to do just. Here, however, I will approach
Wittgenstein in
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a different, almost reverse manner than that of Pook. While he starts first
with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and abstracts the answers to primarily two
questions viz., why Wittgenstein ventured into architecture and what
meaning his designs had I will approach the matter from the other side,
examining first what architectural critics say of the style Wittgenstein
promoted through his designs, how this relates to aesthetic theory as a
whole, and, using Herschel Chipp as a guide, eventually relating largely
accepted aesthetic theories to Wittgenstein's philosophy. My aim, then, is to
elucidate Wittgenstein's almost enigmatic treatment of aesthetics, ethics,
and value in the final four pages of Tractatus, which seem to conflict with his
famous proposal to remain silent of things which we cannot speak. I will
seek to establish a meta-theory, then, of mainstream aesthetic theories,
early Wittgensteinian thought, and my own interpretation of architecture at
this time.
The three story, 11,000 square-foot home, even after a quick glance,
appears lacking. It's massive, sure, but in opposition to styles progressed

not twenty years before in Austria and throughout Europe, Haus Wittgenstein
is starkly unornamented, cold, and completely lacking any joie de vivre
present in the hardly yet forgotten Art Nouveau or its successor, Art Deco,
which began to flourish during this time in the United States and France.
However, Wittgenstein and Engelmann were not alone in promoting such a
mechanistic style: the work of Adolf Loos comes to mind, as do some of the
industrial applications of Albert Kahn. Yet, when either Loos or Kahn
developed residential spaces,
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ornamentation and a human touch were allowed to run rampant across the
drafting table. Haus Wittgenstein takes the cold, utilitarian parts of industry
and puts them in a house, where one might intuit that the residents would
want to escape from the harsh, concrete world of industry. If Louis Sullivan
and the Greene brothers prominent in the 1920s reflected human
appreciation for the beautiful and abstracted that into homes, Wittgenstein
and Engelmann sought to reflect the logical, calculating spirit, perhaps due
to Wittgenstein's early appreciation for Schopenhauer.1 Maybe the design
came out of Wittgenstein's sympathies for Logical Positivism.2Furthermore,
1

It is G. E. M. Anscombe who said, "Wittgenstein had read Schopenhauer and had


been greatly impressed by Schopenhauer... [who] then struck him as
fundamentally right, if only a few adjustments and clarifications were made."
(Anscome, G. E. M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. South Bend: St.
Augustine Press, 2001.)
Pook, David Olson. Working on Oneself: Wittgenstein's Architecture, Ethics and
Aesthetics. Symplok. 2.1 (1994): 48-82. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.

the rigid geometry, the cubic, mechanical forms belong to a specific branch
of modernism developing in architecture firms across post-WWI Europe and
the Americas: cubism.

Cubism in Architecture from the Visual Arts

To understand the emergence of Cubism in the 1920s, an assessment


of stylistic approaches leading up to it is imperative. Since the end of the
Great War, there didn't seem to be much of a consensus among designers
regarding a single stylistic approach, nor even a common theme between
surviving Beaux-Arts practitioners from the late nineteenth
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century, Romanticism, Arts and Crafts, the Prairie School promoted by Frank
Lloyd Wright, the Futurism and Art Nouveau promoted by Antoni Gaud, and
the scores of others. Yet, in the late 1920s, there emerged, among all of
these vastly different styles, some agreement:
Some of the elements which contributed to the synthesis of the postwar era have

been singled out already: the very idea of a modern

architecture; Rationalist

approaches to history and construction; visual

and philosophical concerns with

mechanization; attempts at distilling

certain essentials from tradition; moral

yearnings for honesty, integrity and

simplicity; interpretations of new institutions

and building types in major

industrial cities; aspirations towards internationalism

and

universaility. However, without the influence of Cubism from abstract art,


the

architecture of the 1920s would probably have been very different .3

There certainly arose an analogy between architecture during this time and
visual arts, most familiarly Pablo Picasso, who discovered [a geometric and
spatial character] in the illusionistic world behind the picture plane.4 It is
for that reason that I turn to aesthetic theory developed out of Cubism,
particularly in paintings.
Out of Cubism came many modes Constructivism, Neoplasticism,
among others yet the Cubist movement represented a revolution not only
in the ways of painting, but in the way of viewing the world. Through the
eyes of painters like Alfred Jarry or Henri Rousseau, forms were abstracted in
a way analogous to the way physical labor of a field
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worker was abstracted into the workings of the machinery that served as a
backdrop to the movement. Their primary preoccupation certainly was
geometry. Guillaume Appollinaire, in a 1912 article The Beginnings of
Cubism, describes geometrical figure as the essence of drawing... [that
have] always determined the norms and rules of painting.5 It was of no
3
4
5

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. 149150.
Ibid., 150.
Chipp, Herschel. Theories of Modern Art. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 216219.

stretch of the imagination that


the geometrical foundations of the visual arts would make themselves
manifest eventually. But these Euclidean rules were never stated explicitly
on the canvas: they were in the tool belt of the painter, along with his paints
and canvases, or, in Apollinaire's words, geometry is to the plastic arts what
grammar is to the art of the writer.6
It's hard to read this and not reflect on Wittgenstein. Just as in a state
of affairs objects fit together like links of a chain,7 geometric rules are
unstated. A work of art doesn't express its sense, or rather an artist doesn't
convey a sense to the viewer by simply writing down the process of
composing a square with a straightedge and a compass. In this manner, the
rules cannot be stated: Picasso certainly wouldn't have gotten the same
response from the public if, instead of Guernica as we see it today, he
merely explained the process. That explanation would be, in an aesthetic
sense, completely devoid of meaning, and in comparison to other works of
art, would be akin to the gibberish Wittgenstein states propositions about
logical relations end up providing. Perhaps Wittgenstein wanted the
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Tractatus to speak for itself, but the Vienna Circle, which took his magnum
opus as almost a guide to epistemology, promoted even further that notion
6
7

Ibid., 223.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Dover, 1998. Proposition 2.03.

of the meaninglessness in common discussion of philosophical matters,


claiming verifiability to be the key to separating meaning from gibberish. In
a manner of speaking, the Positivists had an analogue in the art world, the
Salon des Indpendants.
The Salon had among its founding members Albert Gleizes and Jean
Metzinger, the latter of whom wrote extensively on theoretical insights into
Cubism as a completely novel method of producing art, citing Picasso as a
revolutionary who changed the way artists approached form, which was
used for too many centuries as the inanimate support of color and gave it
the prominence it deserved, its right to life and to instability.8 The
prominence of the form became the focal point of Cubism. This isn't to say
that the importance of form wasn't made explicit in the previous centuries of
Western art in fact, just the opposite is the case in representational
paintings but form here, in Cubism, was allowed to strip from itself the
veils that cover its true nature. That is, the Form in a Cubist painting
emerges out of relationships between simpler forms. In a way, the Form in a
painting acts as a machine: as a whole, the parts work together to complete
some task, yet separately they serve little purpose. Apollinaire argues that
this been seen (in the 1920s) in architecture, which grabbed onto a
utilitarian aim. It should have sublime aims: to build the highest tower, to

Chipp, Herschel, 196.

prepare for time and ivy the most beautiful of ruins, to throw
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across a harbor or a river an arch more audacious than the rainbow, and
finally to compose a lasting harmony, the most powerful ever imagined by
man.9 The utilitarian architect ignores the folly of ornamentation and
supplies the world with a building whose Form mirrors its function. The Form
isn't stripped away in lieu of a purely functional building; just the opposite is
happening: beauty comes out of the function and produces the Form, or, in
the words of Fernand Leger:
[T]he more the machine perfects its utilitarian functions, the more
beautiful it becomes... [The automobile at first] was called a horseless
carriage. But when, with

the need for swiftness, it became lower and

longer, when, in consequence,

horizontal lines balanced by curves

became dominant, it became a perfect whole logically organized for its end.
It was beautiful.10
Cubism in art changed forever the way that art will not only be experienced ,
but defined: no longer were the methods of the artist a mystery. The Cubist
painter made his geometry explicit, and showed a reflected a functional
reality, stripped of its ornamentation from paintings in the past. The relation
here between the world and the painting is made explicit through the rigid
9 Ibid., 247.
10 Ibid., 278-279.

use of geometrical rules, analogous to Wittgensteins links of a chain. With


that, I can turn to Cubist architecture as a response to the rapidly changing
views on beauty and ultimately Wittgenstein's attraction to it.

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Cubist Architecture

The ideals of utility and pure Form distilled over into architecture in the
1920s and aided in a new aim: to transcend past styles altogether and purify
the means of expression through the device of abstraction. No more does
one find, in Cubist architecture, the obvious ornamentation of Neoclassicism
or the often obtuse interplay between nature design in Art Nouveau.
Representing appearances fell by the wayside, and in its place was born a
new means of spacial organization. The architect suddenly began creating
spaces rather than constructing buildings.11 Cubism didn't directly come into
architecture in the manner I describe so simply above: it was a combination
of ideals expressed by an assortment of various trades, including painters,
furniture makers, designers and architects, culminating in what became
known as the De Stijl (Dutch for The Style) movement, or Neoplasticism.
Artists like Pied Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich were largely influential

11 Cf. Zumthor, Peter. Thinking Architecture. Zurich: Birkhuser Architecure, 2010.

to the movement, securing for it primarily two important facets: abstraction


and rectilinear form. Jacobus Oud quickly rose to notoriety as a leading
proponent of De Stijl in architecture, whose designs can readily be seen
reflected in Haus Wittgenstein. His designs show a stark contrast to the
dominant prewar architecture. He didn't seek to cover his walls with
paintings and murals, but rather treat is as a sort of abstract sculpture, a
'total-work-ofDeady 9
art', an organism of colour, form, and intersecting planes with a clear
emphasis on an ...open-form, dynamic spatial conception.12 The result
was a three-dimensional version of Cubist paintings: open, asymmetric floor
plans mirrored the complicated interplay of forms of Picasso; the placement
of flat, repeating tectonics mirrored the geometry of Modrian; the stripped
down, brutal interpretation of Form mirrored that of El Lissitzky.
The result is counter-intuitive, at least through the lens of previous
generations of architecture. These spaces somehow became enjoyable,
lasting examples of what overcoming the fear of aesthetic change can offer .
And describing these spaces doesn't help one's case in promoting the artistic
integrity evident in every angle, every horizontal line, every overlapping
block. Herein lies a notable difference between the modern movements in

12 Curtis, William. 152-154.

architecture and the previous generation: I could go on to describe the


justification for every curve, every ornament present in a Beaux-Arts or
Neoclassical structure like I could for a painting by Raphael or Rubens and
some sense of beauty might come to your mind. But a written description of
SR Crown Hall by Mies Van der Rohe would not only be completely devoid of
any sense of beauty, but certainly lacking. It is only in experiencing such
structures can the sense of the aesthetic be known. Here we finally get to
an analogue between Haus Wittgenstein and the Tractatus.

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Haus Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Aesthetics

Wittgenstein, in a word, was obsessed with his project form 19261928. And although he hadn't abandoned philosophy during this time, his
sister wrote to the Vienna Circle through Schlick to essentially leave
Wittgenstein alone, that 'his present work... demands all his energies.'13
Many anecdotes survive of Wittgenstein's acute attention to detail, similar to
stories of Mies setting up a chair during the construction of the Farnsworth
House and demanding each slab of marble be examined by him before being
laid. Wittgenstein, much in the same vain, not only personally designed
13 Pook, David Olson. 75.

every cast iron piece including knobs, hinges, windows, and radiators but
had them recast eight times until they were to his standards. His
persistence manifested further into having a ceiling raised three centimeters
virtually on the same day as the final clean-up of the house, berating
tradesmen to tears, and demanding a keyhole be moved mere millimeters.14
While David Pook links Wittgenstein's somewhat extreme commitment
to his work both as an architect and as a philosopher as justification enough
that his design aligns with Tractatus, I think what we really want here is a
different kind of justification. I've exhausted this above, and through a
stylistic interpretation of Haus Wittgenstein and other examples of Cubist
architecture, I can derive conceptual aspects present in both Cubism and
Wittgenstein's philosophy.
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The purpose of Tractatus at first glance appears to be a logical one,
but Wittgenstein explicitly emphasizes that his true aim is an ethical one in a
letter to von Ficker. That is, the purpose of the book lies almost entirely in
what is not stated. He deduces that value and valuing lie necessarily
outside of the world of language, and from that explains:
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics are transcendental.

14 Ibid., 76-77.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)15


The formatting here is important to note, as explained by Engelmann, who
not only was Wittgenstein's architectural collaborator, but his closest friend
as well. The last statement in parentheses is something Wittgenstein feels
by virtue of the proceeding pages of Tractatus cannot be stated, but he feels
it also shouldn't be passed over in silence. What ethics and aesthetics
share is an enigmatic concern: he clearly can't mean that they're identical:
by intuition that would be absurd. But ethics and aesthetics to Wittgenstein
act in the same way. Ethics as the will of an actor is made manifest through
what that person does, not what he says. In other words, explicit the
Lecture on Ethics and hinted at in Tractatus, is a familiar denial that there
are values in the facts or that a multiplicity of facts (or factual assertions)
can ever yield a value (or value judgment).16 Ethics to Wittgenstein as a
way of living is, however, somewhat discussed in his 1916 notebook:
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In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And
that is what

being happy means.

I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I


appear

dependent.17

15 Tractatus, 6.421.
16 Flanagan, Owen. Wittgenstein's Ethical Nonnaturalism: An Interpretation of Tractatus 6.41-47 and

the 'Lecture on Ethics.' American Philosophical Quarterly. 48.2 (2011), 89. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.
17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks 1914-1916. New York: Harpers, (Out of copyright). 8/7/1916. Web.
<archive.org>. 12 October 2013.

Knowing, then, what can and cannot be stated is directly influential to an


ethical life. Being in agreement with the world means also knowing what the
world, as a totality of facts, can and cannot express, and in this way, ethics
is something that is only shown. Precisely how it is shown we are left to
extrapolate, but intuitively ethics is shown by action if not by words. In the
same vein, aesthetics is something shown, and, as the Cubists expounded,
acts as an analogue to logic: aesthetic value is made manifest as a relation
that does not exist on its own but like links of a chain between forms in a
work of art or structure. And we are given an 11,000 square foot aesthetic
theory a monument to the notion that whatever cannot be said must be
passed over in silence.

References
Anscome, G. E. M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. South Bend:
St. Augustine
Press, 2001.
Chipp, Herschel. Theories of Modern Art. Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 1968.
Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon Press
Limited, 1996.
Flanagan, Owen. Wittgenstein's Ethical Nonnaturalism: An Interpretation of
Tractatus

6.41-47 and the 'Lecture on Ethics.' American Philosophical

Quarterly. 48.2 (2011), 89. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.


Pook, David Olson. Working on Oneself: Wittgenstein's Architecture, Ethics
and Aesthetics. Symplok. 2.1 (1994): 48-82. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks 1914-1916. New York: Harpers, (Out of
copyright). Web. <archive.org>. 12 October 2013.
_______. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Dover, 1998.
Zumthor, Peter. Thinking Architecture. Zurich: Birkhuser Architecure, 2010.

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