Design As Thinking

Image of the house from The Wittgenstein House by Bernhard Leitner, 2000.

Although Wittgenstein’s writings insist on the futility of becoming an expert outside of one’s sphere on knowledge, the existence of his house in Vienna provides one with an opportunity to talk about his architecture in the context of his writing. Though as Bernhard Leitner warns in his The Wittgenstein House: “Wittgenstein’s architecture is intended to be and indeed must be read and understood in the language of architecture. It should not be treated as philosophy translated into a building or as applied thought.” Leitner argues, following Wittgenstein’s line of thought, for the separation of the two practices (philosophy and architecture) and the impossibility of examining one in terms of the other. 

However, the house and the writing share a common author, and particularly one who insisted on saying nothing to exceed one’s competence and resisting the intention to embellish one’s discourse by borrowing from another field. This can be an argument for “functionalism” in architecture: for creating space that signfies exactly what it means and in agreement with anti-ornamentation ideas of Wittgenstein’s contemporary Adolf Loos. 

The house has been described as “unlovable,” and  “unlivable,”  adjectives that can be applied to attempts at pure functionalism in architecture as well as language that do not soften the edges through slight concealment or embellishment.