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Common Knowledge 8.3 (2002) 549


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Review

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect

Paul Widjeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 240 pp.

In 1926, when the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein was between careers in Vienna, his architect friend Karl Engelmann persuaded him to help design the house commissioned by the philosopher's sister Margarete Stonborough. The Kundmanngasse, as the house on that street is known, is the subject of Widjeveld's fascinating, superbly illustrated, and elegantly produced book. Its great feat is to relate the severity, simplicity, and austere beauty of the residence's design, whose execution took two full years to complete, to the cultural milieu of Vienna, on the one hand, and to Wittgenstein's philosophical thinking, on the other. Just as the Tractatus "calculates" what can meaningfully be said in language, in order to show what is beyond language, so the Kundmanngasse testifies, in its smallest detail—doorknobs, keyholes, window frames—to the whole that can only be inferred from each part. Not for Wittgenstein, the trompe l'oeil effects of his mentors Alfred Loos and Engelmann. Rather, clarity and integrity are all. In tracing the philosopher's motives and decisions, and in providing much hitherto unknown archival material, Widjeveld has produced the definitive study of Kundmangasse.

 


—Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Stanford University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her many books include Wittgenstein's Ladder, Radical Artifice, The Futurist Moment, The Dance of the Intellect, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Poetry On and Off the Page, and, most recently, Twenty-First- Century Modernism.

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