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. 

Each time we walk through a city we are constructing our own personal city. As one skims a familiar book, recognizing phrases and sentences read long ago, reading over the choicest parts, the walker traverses the grid of the city editing his own story out of the text spread out in front. The architecture, geography, sounds and texts of the city collage together to create an indelible presence of the city at ground level that is lost at the level of the map. Every point on the grid has a story, it just has to be made legible. The richness of the stories lessens as one moves out from the private epicenter toward the public sphere. Family histories, everyday conversations give way to historical plaques and markers as one moves from the inside of a building out into the street. 

Some cities are better at erasing themselves than others. Many cities seem to be built anew each morning at sunrise. The marks of each day are erased or made illegible. Stories are forgotten, and those that did remember them pass away. Telling the history of a place when no ruin or artifact remains becomes very different with time. At some point all one can satisfy themselves with is pointing to the place where the erasure took place, without ever discovering what it was that was erased.

An architectural landmark can help anchor the grid of a city, just like a large atrium can help organize and assign order and meaning to the internal space of a building. Buenos Aires’ Obelisco draws the population of the city out for political rallies and celebrations of futbol victories. By functioning as a symbol of the city, it elevates any event that it witnesses to the status of being worthy of inscription in a historical narrative of Buenos Aires. In anchoring the physical space of the city it also helps the residents of the city organize and contextualize their memories. Its sharp point corner pins the physical grid while giving the residents of Buenos Aires a place they can rely on to localize their memories.

The presence of the Obelisco gives every image it appears in a potential of historical significance. It was erected in recent past to celebrate the founding the city and thus becomes a physical manifestation of the city’s existence through time. Its verticality helps to organize and frame the tourist photography that takes place around it. The Obelisico simultaneously structures the space of memory, the architectural/civic grid and the representational space of Buenos Aires.