Wittgenstein Haus: the logic of building

In 1927, Wittgenstein returned to Vienna to design a house for his sister. At that moment of his life, after having studied engineering in Manchester, logic in Cambridge, writing his Tractatus while an Italian prisoner of war, living two years in isolation in a hut in Norway and working as a school teacher for in an Austrian village, he had eventually renounced openly intellectual activities and was working as a gardener in the now former imperial capital. His sister thought collaborating on the design of the house with a contracted architect could be a stimulating work for him. She was right, because her brother immediately got caught full time in the project and could hardly stop rephrasing the house over and over again after two years of work.

This building is what should have been the ideal link between logische Aufbau and Bauhaus. Logical positivism was a methodology developed by the intellectuals of the so-called Vienna circle (e.g. Schlick, Neurat, Carnap) to contrast interpretations of things made on the basis of assumptions that existed beyond the sphere of the immediate and direct experience of the observer – metaphysical reason. They made philosophy into a method, whose rationale was to separate meaningful statements from the quicksand of metaphysics, where the object of analysis are sublime facts, transcendental realities beyond the ordinary. Their philosophy was therefore constructed as a critique of language and not any more a critique of reason, as it was with Kant.

The volumes of Wittgenstein Haus develop or better derive as propositions one from another. Relations between the elements have an objective, visible nature. They are shown, rather than told. The house, long forgotten, was eventually bought by the Bulgarian government in 1972, and today is used as Bulgarian cultural institute. In 1929, he left Vienna and went back to Cambridge to work on the problems that led him to develop the idea of the language games, which he wrote about in his second book, the Investigations. Every situation is a "game" with its own special language. Misunderstanding happens when the words used to play one game are used to play another. To establish and maintain communication one constantly has to shift the meaning one associates with a certain word or expression.

The core of the house is the central hall. The rooms are collocated around the hall and each one has double doors. Each door is made of vertical panels, of alternatively wood and glass. You can see through the doors, but only as long as you keep moving, because when you face the door the see-through panels correspond to thick ones. Only by directing your gaze sideways you find a thin clear line and establish a visual contact with the space behind the two doors. Walking inside the house equals to reading his Investigations.