Increasing the idea of reality by Juan D. López-Arquillo

The house conformed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister Margaret between 1926 and 1929, in Wien after the empire, is well-known more because of the interpretative sense of it than the house itself. Between the ideal home -containing a clear space only for thinking- built by a Cambridge professor in Correction of Thomas Bernhard; and the house -formed by removed cubical spaces, looking as a void box-, as described by Claude Magris during his travelling across the Donau, a fame of ideal uninhabitable house caused in the limits between a real home and an impossible house.

External people acting on architecture are a foundation condition on which the architecture project has been based during the whole history. The aulic approach of great buildings, or the lasting times of the architecture opposed to the short human life are some of the architecture characteristics which make it interesting for much people in the deepest history. Would not be new the hearing of a philosopher being interested in his sister´s new house, raised on the surroundings of the complicated city of Wien during the transformations past the 2nd industrial revolution.

Called “Wittgenstein Haus” just because of its owner, the architecture and philosophy history has assimilated its name to the supposed author. This house has been shown as the work of a philosopher obsessed with the concepts of truth, who has erected a suburban palace guided by the rigid structurative method of his logical system. The house has been shown and is shown -even nowadays- as a “house incarnated from logic” -the exact words of Hermine Wittgenstein-. It’s a simple attempt of giving a metalinguistic order to the material and technical set which is an architect´s project.

Considering that myth as a turning point, some investigations about the house were published since the first years of the 80´s. The house has the possibility of altering the postmodern consciousness, so it is able to be described as an abnormal start to the International Style, and that´s why the status of this house is always present in the International Style history, never as a founding object, although displayed.

When the house become objective of a study, it´s easy to discover some contradictions, starting in the confused work of Paul Engelmann -the architect who began the project- and reaching the fails in the simplest principles of the building art. Once you inhabit the house, the boxed spaces of the plan have no correspondence with the spatial complexity; so the standing inside the city, and the forced reduction of its elements. This is a house which oppose the critical consideration to the living reality of its spaces and relations, a house which reveals a complex project process; as actual as its complexity degree; a house not born from the pragmatism although it appears to be.

Studied during an extensive doctoral investigation, when the house is newly deeply documentarily reviewed, unpublished texts are discovered in Wien from 2006 to 2011, explaining some explicit contradictions in order to discover the fact that it is not only one piece of architecture, but a project of philosophy speech built with techniques of architectonic project.

The new discovered characters contrasts against we thought about that until arriving  a house in which any formal dissection keeps awake a complex project process, today more effective than ever; a house whose accomplishment is not result of modern pragmatism although pretends to be it. The Wittgenstein house has been somehow insulted by any postmodern critics, assimilating this house to a radical statement of those formal principles of the International Style. It is also timeless object of fascination of architects everywhere in the world, who know the house in some interpretative articles that assimilate the house to a heroic monument of the creative architect trying to impose his truth against the one of the world.

The extremely thin line separating the hard effort to raise an ideal house against the demonstration attempt of the impossibility of it, is apparently shaped in this house according to a compositional principles so similar to the first ones of the International Style: architecture as a play of pure volumes, predominance of the regularity in the composition, and absence of added decoration. These supposed evidences have justified the postmodern accusation of the modern origin of palais.

The project starts in Christmas of 1925, with the desire of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein to translate to a new palace. She was one of the sisters of Ludwig Wittgenstein (mechanical engineer, after one of the most important philosophers of the first half of XX century) and the first commission was contracted to Paul Engelmann, a local architect pupil of Adolf Loos, who collaborated with him in the project of the Lido Ville in 1923.  The first version of the project was located in an interior garden of a property inside the Ring limits; and was defined as an axonometric classic rural villa as Palladio would made. During the Spring of 1926, Ludwig Wittgenstein reach the project as he was trying to work again on philosophy after several years acting as rural teacher in the deepest Alps Tirol.

Ludwig Wittgenstein starts in May 1926 to change almost every character; calling himself “architect” –as appeared in the professional guide of Wien from 1926 to 1929- and displacing the original site to a newer one in the surrounding district III, outside the Ring limits. The main plan is fitted to exact proportions, the highs dimensions are introduced and eliminate every historic wink. Paul Engelmann, whose project constituted the master plan for Wittgenstein´s starting, decided to leave the process after finishing the executive plan, in November 1926.

The house will be no more a palace; it´s now a complete urban project; so an existing promontory inside the parcel Wittgenstein creates a platform-garden in order to separate the house out of the city, being located in the very center. This urban plinth increases the artificial character of the street in this point, so a gardened nature and a simple-volume house are shown as a complex, founded just apart of the historic processes of parcel+urban nets+edification. The project reproduces a rural nature never found in the existing place. 

The project of the house is an active update of the historic type of the rural palace, a time quality which makes the proposal stay fixed permanently in history. Although its independent character, at the same time the urban operation is shown to us as a kindly action into the surroundings. The main volume of the house is setted in the neighborhood with a stereotomic action, which adapt the ancient land highs with a new platform on its maximum level, over 4 meters above the streets. This artificial level is the platform from which the house implies the stamp into the urban scene made by its clean, pure and compact surfaces; and it´s perceived into its urban landscape as a contradictory, unadapted strange master piece.

Nevertheless, once the house is inhabited, the global substractioning -on which the project is based- is surpassed by the atmospheric and elementary experience of its spaces, introducing an enjoyment of phenomenology. This sensitive living has been avoided by architecture and art critics, but now we return to review it from contemporary cancellation of categories of the style.

When the house is occupied and inhabited, not only architecture but an investigation tool of a philosopher, obsessed in the study of containing a germ of a universal structure in a simple configuration of the unique building. In front of the massive opinion of it, the Wittgenstein house is able to be discovered not only as an architecture project, but an investigation method in order to enrich the reality perception that Wittgenstein had, and with that turning point of his thinking make easier for us the increasing capacity of our understanding. The structurative thinking of the Tractatus (1918) was gone to the perceptive wealth of Marleau-Ponty, Bachelard and, of course, the Investigations, of Ludwig Wittgenstein too (1951).

Wittgenstein, during the original project sampling and during the whole building Works (which taked from January 1927 to January 1929) was reducing progressively the interpretative perception in the significance of every item. Structure is only structure and no more, locksmiths are functional designs, nothing to be shown. Wittgenstein gathers Engelmann´s original plan, elevating the quality tone during a whole time work of two years, living in the same place of the house. Wittgenstein makes specific space and material, not only in order to be built, but trying to express a universal piece of space in that limited house. Wittgenstein decided to use only two materials for surfaces, dark-grey polished concrete for floors, and light grey stucco both in interior and exterior walls faces. Architecture forms in Wittgenstein arise from the extreme effort of materials ordered by different functions of a unique material, but in different locations.

The Beaux-arts project of Paul Engelmann on which Wittgenstein acted around makes the architecture of the house got fixed into a type; in the way as The Tourette monastery of Le Corbusier remains in the historic time instead of Ronchamp, with no type to fix at. This house is conformed on timeless principia corpus of the historic architecture: symmetry, material, structure, multipurpose axis and adaptable functions. Working on this items, the abstraction forms inside the structural systems is one of the Wittgenstein ´s most important contribution, as so it´s possible with them to manage the softer wienese light inside the interior spaces. The Wittgenstein house is obviously linked to the Mediterranean character experienced in some of the Adolf Loos´s project, as the Lido Villa of 1923. Light is diffuse and tenuous, with a degree components that even make almost white the natural light when the sun is located towards the South. In the transition between inside and outside we discovered a complete sequence of visual connections and accesses that make us establish an immediate relation between both environments. That can be explained by the conformation of the enclosure system as a generic surfaces without thickness, making a direct contact between inner and outer space with no more mediation than 40 cm. of massive brick finished in both faces with the same stucco, that brings about the thermal failure that makes the house uninhabitable at certain seasons.

In spite of an evident professional ignorance shown at the very first visit, the house is filled with apparently insignificant accidents that need a kindly experience to be discovered. Positions and scale of doors, axial views and their evolutions with the movement, spaces dimensions associated to functions with several possible uses… the own vocabulary formed by the house project into the details will be discovered as a special material conformation executed years later by the abstract art and the minimalism. The vertical scope of the house in every plant is conformed by the relation between plant size and use needed height; according to a precise adjustment defined by Wittgenstein for each part. The scale is truly affected by Wittgenstein on the master lines of Engelmann´s project. The house does not pretend to be the result of a synthesized speech got from a previous system of dimensions – working digitally -, but is solved in a programmatic way according to a previous sense, located in each difference that requires the architecture gesture –working analogically-. With this working method, the most representative example are the door cranks, placed in the whole house to 154.5 cm of the ground, located according to the figure of the door, and not to a normal distance of use. This implies a change of the space scale. In fact, all the door cranks are over the shoulder.

To project architecture will be therefore -for a philosopher playing to be an architect- an intellectual conformation, thinking and acting on the clarification of these connections that takes us to define meaning analogies between relations and fields; creating a complex nature of architectonic object and urban situation, whose bidirectionality of process forces to discover that it is due thinking when projecting, and while projecting, beginning to think again.

Coherence between ideal concept, representation and reality, would have been the contribution of the Tractatus to the architecture project, but  is actually betrayed by the same philosopher, its author, who plays as an architect during two years, discovering that it´s impossible to work in a specific methodology of analytical and rationally linear work, just because the architectonic project is biunivocal, and any decision opens the possibilities of the condition that fixed the first decision about the work starting. The project become an eternal cycle of taking decisions that brings out the destabilization of the conditions that justified that first decision.

This feedback destabilizes the philosopher who separates different scopes of reality in conceptual impermeable containers, and discovers that inhabiting is not only based on the precision or the exactitude, but also in apprehending connections, relations and analogies, always inside a linear and positivist technical civilization, founded on the exactitude and the precision. Without the actions of living; relations are only objects. This attempt to release the architecture project off somehow personalization of the industrial figure has the opposite effect, because if lower is the tolerance to the industrial error, is needed the use the artisan capacity for the concrete personalization of a work, before supposed as an industrial result. That was the effect of the objects of the Wiener Werkstate, mostly designed by Joseph Hofmann, who later Walter Benjamin would refer in his sad “the technical reproducibility of the art work”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein in that part of his life tried to think philosophy playing the role of the architect, and projecting a space fitting functions into proportions, with concrete materials, suddenly discovered a structure of nonlinear, biunivocal, changeable decisions making between the extremes.

That´s why the palais Wittgenstein is brutal but sensible, empty but plenty, nihilist but sensual; and thanks to the opposed meanings of the process, the house creates an atmosphere convinced of the unity of the relation between meaning and material, conforming a house that is not only an architecture project, but an instrument of investigation that enriches the perception of the reality and facilitates us, still today, an increasingly wealth in our watching.

It´s surprising to think a simple house as an engine of an important change for the humanity. Although fifty years long have been necessary to get recognized…

Text.- Juan D. López-Arquillo

NOTES.-

N1 With evident readings from the formativity of physical processes.
N2 During the years of study with Loos, Engelmann conducted studies on the villas that K.F. Schinkel and Otto Wagner performed in Berlin and Vienna. In a publication of the School of Architecture that Loos founded in Vienna, Engelmann was making a project of a "type" villa, according to which Wagner had made following the cuts of Schinkel.
N3 The architecture of modernism establishes the fundamental dichotomy of surface work in the difference between the domestic interior and the exterior.
N4 In Ludwig Wittgenstein, Op. Cit.

FUNDAMENTAL BIBLIOGRAPHY.-

1. Aicher, Otl. “Analógico y Digital” trad. de Yves Zimmermann, 2000. Ed. GGili, Barcelona 2001
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3. Baudrillard, Jean “El sistema de objetos” ed. Siglo XXI, Madrid 1969
4. Bernard, M. “Les mecenes de la secession » artículo en el catálogo de la muestra «Vienne. L´apocalypse joyeuse ».. Centro Pompidou, París 1986.
5. Broch, Hermann “Die Schlafwandler” (Los sonámbulos) ed. Lumen, Barcelona 1986
6. Engelmann, Paul. “Ludwig Wittgenstein” ed. Engelmann  Tel Aviv, 1948.
7. Wittgenstein, Hermine “Escritos de familia”  ed. Verlag  Viena  1996   
8. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus” ed. Alianza Editorial Madrid 2003.
9. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Investigaciones Filosóficas” ed. Crítica, UNAM Barcelona-Mexico 1988