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. Maybe the design came out of Wittgenstein's sympathies for Logical Positivism.Furthermore, 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 post-war 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.

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. 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. It was of no 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.

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, 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

Deady 6Tractatus to speak for itself, but the Vienna Circle, which took his magnum opus as almost a guide to epistemology, promoted even further that notion 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. 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 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. 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.

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 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.Deady 8Cubist 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. 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 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-of-

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art', an organism of colour, form, and intersecting planes with a clear emphasis on an ...open-form, dynamic spatial conception. 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 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.Deady 10Haus Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Aesthetics

Wittgenstein, in a word, was obsessed with his project form 1926-1928. 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.' 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 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.

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.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)

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). 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.

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.ReferencesAnscome, 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. . 12 October 2013.

_______. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York: Dover, 1998.

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

Curtis, William J. R. Modern Architecture since 1900. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. 149-150.

Ibid., 150.

Chipp, Herschel. Theories of Modern Art. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 216-219.

Ibid., 223.

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

Chipp, Herschel, 196.

Ibid., 247.

Ibid., 278-279.

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

Curtis, William. 152-154.

Pook, David Olson. 75.

Ibid., 76-77.

Tractatus, 6.421.

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.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks 1914-1916. New York: Harpers, (Out of copyright). 8/7/1916. Web. . 12 October 2013.