Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect

the long version

Margaret Stonborough, a Vienna socialite (famously painted by Gustav Klimt in one of the "gold" painting series) commissioned architect Paul Engelmann in 1926 to construct an urban dwelling for her in Vienna. Engelmann delivered a plan for a very simplified mansion which over the next two years was considerably pushed further toward simplicity by Stonborough's brother, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Although both Engelmann and Wittgenstein had known architect Adolf Loos, the two had differing ideas for how the house should be completed. But their respective contributions in this book are revealed to have a necessary and sequential relationship, with Englemann delivering an initial modernity with up-to-code blueprint basics and the mania for precision of Wittgenstein further removing all baroque vestiges from the original scheme. This achieved a hyper-modernity which has been documented in Wijdeveld's book like no other in my experience.