The house that Wittgenstein designed
Recently I had the chance to visit Vienna, which has to be one of the most significant cities in 20th century intellectual history.
This building, which looks like aliens landed their craft on the acropolis, was designed by Gustav Klimt and housed the Vienna Secession exhibitions.
Interestingly enough the building was financed by Karl Wittgenstein whose son Ludwig also dabbled in architecture, although he had a rather different style from Klimt.
Ludwig Wittgenstein designed this building in 1926.
I wasn’t able to go or see inside the house, despite my fellow sightseer demonstrating how we could jump over the wall. Apparently LW spent a year designing the radiators and installed solid sheet metal curtains that could be lowered to the floor using a pulley system.
Better known for his philosophical work, Ludwig Wittgenstein was the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus whose famous lines such as "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." seem to express the thought that guided the design of this very, umm, factual looking building.
It looks like he began with the dimensions of the windows and then the space between the windows, then the distance from the edge of the windows to the corners of the building and so on. Indeed it is claimed that all the proportions of the building are either 3:1, 3:2 or 2:1.
In my horribly crude understanding of the Tractatus the world is constructed through the meshing together of possible facts which are themselves composed of other facts. The space of logically possible configurations of facts acts as a kind of grid into which worlds must fit.
Someone looking at the world in this way might see architectural design as a process of defining basic facts and then assembling them in a logically coherent way. In accordance with this principle the building completely lacks any kind of decoration and I think this sparseness gives it a reassuring kind of splendour.
I expect Wittgenstein thought Klimt’s dome was rather garish and superficial, perhaps even nonsensical.
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