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At first, Gretl had commissioned architect Paul Engelmann, student of the modernist architect and architectural theorist, Adolf Loos. “Ornament is crime!” Loos declared in a widely quoted essay of 1908.³⁵ Wittgenstein had known Loos for some years.³⁶ Engelmann created the initial plans, then Wittgenstein took over. A working drawing of November 1926 has Engelmann and Wittgenstein both listed as architects. But when it was finished, Engelmann said, “he was actually the architect and not myself. Although when he started working on the project the plans had already been completed, I view the result as his and not my achievement.”³⁷

“Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect.” This is how he signed off in letters he wrote at the time.³⁸ To the one book of philosophy published in his lifetime, we can add one building, competed in 1928 after two years of hard work.

A small entryway was followed by an anteroom with a cloakroom (and off that WC and a washroom), then ten steps up into a wide central hallway. To the left, tall glass doors opened out onto a terrace, and doors to a dining room which also opened onto the terrace. Ahead was an alcove in which Gretl placed a sculpture of a discus thrower. Behind the wall was a stair to the upper levels, encircling an elevator in a glass-walled shaft. To the right were a salon, and off this a library and another terrace.

The effect of the entry and hallway was reminiscent of Viennese palace architecture, and the house came to be called among family members, “Palais Stonborough.” Chronicler of the fraught history of the house, Bernhard Leitner, takes a phrase “family resemblance” from Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations, but there is no evidence that the architect-philosopher had any such thought at the time. Leitner fought to have the house saved from demolition in the 1970s, but not disfiguration when it was purchased in 1976 and remodeled for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.³⁹

Apart from the hallway and its overall size (Gretl lived in the house with her husband and two sons, a cook, two girls who assisted her in the kitchen, three maids, a lady’s maid, a governess, and a chauffeur), there was nothing palace-like about the building.

All the surfaces were artificial: the walls plastered in a pale stuccolustro with touches of ochre and red; the almost-black polished concrete slabs on the floor; the varnished steel windows, doors, and window screens. Every line was rigorously straight. Chandeliers were forbidden; instead there were unadorned light bulbs. Carpets were forbidden too, and also curtains, in place of which Wittgenstein designed heavy steel screens.

Defying their weight of over one hundred kilograms, these rose effortlessly from the floor with a block and tackle system of pulleys and counterweights.

And the handles …

Wittgenstein spent a year agonizing over the door handles. They were lever mechanisms, austerely simple, placed quite high on the door, and, though in the same style, of different size and at different heights on the door depending on its proportions.⁴⁰ Because the doors were steel, there was no rosette. Wittgenstein arranged for them to be cast in bronze to his design.⁴¹

Predication: the handle begs the opening of the door. The meaning function of the entity transposes with the action for which it has been designed. The meaning form of the handle transposes with embodied movement in space. The handle acts when acted upon. Agency in the case of objects reveals itself in their workability, their utility, and the nuances of their feel.

Here Wittgenstein was working with meanings that are beyond the limits of language. Though of course, we can name these meanings, albeit awkwardly because text about Wittgenstein’s handles is by affordance less than the experience of feeling the handles in one’s hand. This, we can no longer do, because they were thrown away in the 1976 renovation. We are left with pictures, and text, and our mental images of feeling and opening – strangely high on the door. As smooth as modernity, they must have been.

“Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought. It makes one want to respond with a gesture.”⁴² Almost thirty years after his death, this enigmatic aphorism was published in a book of scraps from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. And this one: “Working on philosophy is really like working on oneself – as is often true of working on architecture. Working on one’s own perception, on how one sees things (and what one demands of them).”⁴³

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³⁴ Bernhard Leitner, 2000, The Wittgenstein House, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 22.

³⁵ Adolf Loos, 1998, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, translated by M. Mitchell, Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, pp. 167–76.

³⁶ David Macarthur, 2014a, “Working on Oneself in Philosophy and Architecture: A Perfectionist Reading of the Wittgenstein House,” Architectural Theory Review 19(2):124–40, p. 125. doi: 10.1080/13264826.2014.951869; David Macarthur, 2014b, “Reflections on ‘Architecture Is a Gesture’ (Wittgenstein),” Paragrana 23(1):88–100; Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, 1973, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, p. 92.

³⁷ Bernhard Leitner, 2000, The Wittgenstein House, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 23; Nana Last, 2008; Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space and Architecture, New York, NY: Fordham University Press, p. 92; Bernhard Leitner, 1976, The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Documentation, New York, NY: New York University Press.

³⁸ Bernhard Leitner, 2000, The Wittgenstein House, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 32.

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 26–28, 64–69, 39–46.

⁴⁰ Nana Last, 2008; Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space and Architecture, New York, NY: Fordham University Press, pp. 106, 112.

⁴¹ Bernhard Leitner, 2000, The Wittgenstein House, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 170–79.

⁴² Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1931–44 [1980], Culture and Value, edited by G.H. von Wright, translated by P. Winch, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 22e.

⁴³ Ibid., 16e.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 186-188. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Wittgenstein’s Handles §MS2.1.1b