Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Journal Containing Photographs taken by Moritz Nahr of the “Wittgenstein House”, (1930’s)
“Working on philosophy is really working on oneself- as is often true of working in architecture. Working on one’s own perception, on how one sees things, and what one demands of what he sees.”
In the early 1930’s, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to paste photographs of his friends, family and special occasions into a small album. The photographs were pasted on the right-hand side, with the verso pages remaining blank. In a purely pictorial language he mounted a multi layered image of his milieu: without text, dates, notations, captions, page numbers, and without any clear temporal sequence. In this album, which he always carried with him, Wittgenstein pasted a handful of photographs of the house that he had helped to built, along with architect Paul Engelmann, for his sister Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein (seen in the top image above). These photographs were taken by Moritz Nahr after the completion of the building.
In November 1925, Wittgenstein’s sister commissioned the Austrian architect, Paul Engelmann to design and build a large townhouse. Margaret also invited her brother to collaborate with Engelmann on the design in part to distract him from an incident that had happened while he had been a primary school teacher: he had hit a boy for getting an answer wrong and the boy had collapsed. The architect was someone Wittgenstein had come to know while training to be an Artillery Officer in Olmutz. Engelmann designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos: three rectangular blocks. Wittgenstein showed a great interest in the project and in Engelmann’s plans and poured himself into the project for over two years. He focused on the windows, doors, door knobs, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified, to the point where everyone involved in the project was exhausted. One of the architects, Jacques Groag wrote in a letter: “I come home very depressed with a headache after a day of the worst quarrels, disputes, vexations, and this happens often. Mostly between me and Wittgenstein. “When the house was nearly finished he had a ceiling raised 30mm so the room had the exact proportions he wanted.
It is said that Margaret eventually refused to pay for the changes Wittgenstein kept demanding, so he bought himself a lottery ticket in the hope of paying for things that way. It took him a year to design the door handles, and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said of it that there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: “It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor.
The house was finished by December 1928, and the family gathered there that Christmas to celebrate its completion. Describing the work, Ludwig’s eldest sister, Hermine wrote: “Even though I admired the house very much, I always knew that I neither wanted to, nor could, live in it myself. It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods than for a small mortal like me” Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, disliked it, and when Margaret’s nephew came to sell it, he reportedly did so on the grounds that she had never liked it either. Wittgenstein himself found the house too austere, saying it had good manners, but no primordial life or health. He nevertheless seemed committed to the idea of becoming an architect: the Vienna City Directory listed him as “Dr. Ludwig Wittgenstein, occupation: architect” between 1933 and 1938.
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