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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,
Deady 3
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
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.
architecture; Rationalist
and
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.
Ibid., 223.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Dover, 1998. Proposition 2.03.
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
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.
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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
Deady 10
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.
Deady 11
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.
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.
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