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Ludwig Wittgenstein Architect (Design Book)

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This is a fine and lovely book that covers everything from blueprints to color photos of details. Between the years 1926 and 1928 Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann designed and built a house in early Modernist style for W.'s sister, Margaret Stonborough. I love this book for its presentation of W's lean prose and thinking here shown in a concrete form.

Who's afraid of modernism?
A neglected house, a residual example of a true modern mood, is taken, to apologetically demonstrate what modern nerves are and what this means for modern architecture.
This house built by Wittgenstein in 1928, after a personal crisis of vocation for philosophy, has been categorized as a built philosophy, a positive manifestation of the most intricate logical speculation of the past century.
It is not.
It is a perfect act of architecture.3
This is true for a finite number of reasons: it is built by an intelligent engineer, a reflexive person obsessed with truth and morality, a creative mathematician who was genuinely questioning the basis of mathematical logic, a non-creative-non-artistic-disinterested-not trained architect (means literally out of history), and finally a man with `pathologically modern' nerves.
Many critics have looked at this house as a formalistic composition with a specific and universal proportion system, as a built philosophy, and as a biographical manifestation: it means they've looked at it as an object upon which formulate or project pre-formed methodologies.
This happens because this house is virgin. It has no built-in theoretical formulation: it is a null point that generated, in a specific moment in time, a true zeitgeist epiphany, a condensation of invisible historical forces that shaped it despite the author or through his hands.

"I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking, but that it was provided for me by someone else and I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boatsman Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russel, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. Can one take Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductive thinking? - What I invent are new comparisons."(Ludwig Wittgenstein, diaries)4


As a preliminary assumption Wittgenstein's house can be read as the 20th century's Secret Moral Machine: its bare white walls, its bare light bulbs, address with a force that is mystified in other modern projects, the need for morality, the need for moral integrity opposed to the guilty forces of capitalism. In other terms, it managed to render visibly and clearly how capitalist economy and the realm of mass production needed their rational, illuminist background to be wrapped by a moral project. Truth is full of beauty.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of GeniusAdolf Loos - Teorias y Obras (Spanish Edition)