Wittgenstein's Stonborough House and the Architecture of Tadao Ando
This article first appeared in French in Daruma in Spring 2007.
Botzwana 12/2008
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Stonborough House stands as a singular instance of a philosopher’s attempt to articulate his ideas through architecture. Emerging from a profound psychological crisis that had led to a temporary suspension of his philosophical work, Wittgenstein was invited by his sister, Margaret, to design a house for her in the suburbs of Vienna. Despite having no formal training in architecture, he accepted the task with remarkable enthusiasm. The planning and construction of the house (1926–28) coincide with the transitional phase between what are commonly referred to as the early and the later periods of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. At this time, he was on the verge of abandoning his rigorously logical early position and seeking new modes of expression through less formal, more reflective forms of thought.
For decades—well into the late 1970s—the Stonborough House was met with relative indifference by both philosophers and architects. By now, however, it has been thoroughly reassessed, both with regard to its place in the history of modern architecture and in terms of its relation to Wittgenstein’s philosophical concerns.¹ The aim of the present note is not to contribute further to these analyses, but rather to suggest that a distinctive attitude toward modernity, characteristic of Wittgenstein, may also be understood as a dynamic driving force in the work of the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. I shall begin by outlining the most striking points of resemblance between Ando and Wittgenstein, evident both in their architectural expression and in their personal dispositions. First and foremost, it should be noted that neither Wittgenstein nor Ando benefited from formal, full-time architectural training. This shared condition of self-conscious “dilettantism” may have played a significant role in shaping analogous features within their respective bodies of work.
1. The firm decision to resist all tendencies.
2. The principle to value intuition much higher than any geometrical rule (for Wittgenstein, pre-established rules can only intuitively be shown).
3. The appreciation of craftsmanship.
4. The decision to stick to a certain kind of material particularly well suited to the ideal of precision within the context of certain architectural ideas.
5. The choice of "hard" and durable materials (metal, concrete).
6. The evaluation of the effect of light and shadow (more or less forgotten in mainstream Western modern architecture) leading to a severity of abstraction, whose scope goes beyond the creation of a merely "abstract space". As a consequence, the perception of depth and shallowness appears as "pure".
7. An extremely simple exterior of their houses hides a unique interior.
Stonborough House
Simplicity
Simplicity occupies a central place in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which is broadly defined by a rejection of essentialism. Wittgenstein refuses to understand appearances as determined by any underlying essential content. Instead, he develops what might be called a formalist philosophy—one that insists on the self-sufficiency of form, without severing form from life itself. Yet for Wittgenstein, form is never purely abstract; nor is it merely functional, since a function may still be adjusted to the contingent demands of life. Rather, (aesthetic or moral) form represents the highest ideal according to which life ought to be shaped.
This “form of life,” or “style of life,” cannot be articulated through principles abstracted from lived experience. Instead, it appears as a picture that asserts its validity at the very moment of its emergence. In this sense, form manifests itself through the silence surrounding what cannot be said. It thus assumes the character of a transcendental input, uniting ethics and aesthetics in a self-sufficient whole. By designing the Stonborough House, Wittgenstein pointed toward a way of expressing philosophical thought through an activity that does not generate language but instead approaches the production of pictures—an activity aimed at giving form to human life. That activity is architecture.
Wittgenstein’s rejection of both aestheticism and functionalism—so long as they remain merely linguistic principles arbitrarily derived from life—found few adherents among Western modern architects. It required a Japanese kindred spirit to pursue comparable ideas with equal radicalism. In the work of both Wittgenstein and Tadao Ando, we encounter a simplicity and sobriety capable of producing a sense of the “objective.” This sobriety is not deployed in the service of functionalism elevated to architecture’s supreme aim, nor is simplicity the result of a purely aestheticizing rejection of ornament, as in the case of Adolf Loos. Instead, both Wittgenstein and Ando seek a form of purity that surpasses the demands of function as well as those of mere aesthetic refinement.
Form of Life
The issue at stake is the search for a “form of life.” In 1980, Tadao Ando remarked that “life patterns can be extracted and developed from living under severe conditions” (Japan Architect, 1980: 4). This claim is unmistakably Wittgensteinian in spirit. When Ando sets out to eliminate the superfluous, he is not pursuing a form of functionalism designed to deliver superficial comfort. His Azuma House (Row House in Sumiyoshi), for example, has often been criticized as irrational or inconvenient. Yet Ando characteristically refuses to yield to such social expectations. What matters more than social, functional, or aesthetic imperatives is, as he puts it, “the clarity of one’s logic.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s house, however “logical” it may appear in its formal purity and rigor, is likewise notoriously impractical and thus, in conventional terms, “illogical.” Yet it follows its own logic. One may therefore say that for both Wittgenstein and Ando, the authentic architectural task is not to “create rules for the pleasure of it” (cf. Ando in Shintai), but to establish rules whose necessity arises from their own internal coherence. Such a logic cannot be fully explained; it manifests itself instead as a kind of “private logic.” As noted earlier, for Wittgenstein this logic marks the coincidence of ethics and aesthetics. Ando expresses a closely related idea when he asserts that “beauty dwells in the function” (ibid.).
Rather than opposing function and aesthetics, Wittgenstein and Ando demand that function itself be aesthetically and morally justified. They refuse to accept function as a self-sufficient explanation. From their shared perspective, modernity suffers from the absence of such a genuine architectural stance—one grounded in a morality capable of coordinating aesthetic form with a corresponding “form of life.”
The “emptiness” sought by Wittgenstein when he calls for silence at the moment the unspeakable (das Unsagbare) has crystallized corresponds closely to Ando’s appeal to silence as the zero degree of symbolization. Here, there is no speech other than that articulated by empty space itself—a point made explicit when Ando remarks: “I prefer the space to speak, and the walls to produce no sense of their own identity.”
Emptiness, Silence
In Tadao Ando’s work, silence is deeply informed by the Buddhist notion of emptiness.² The affinity with Ludwig Wittgenstein becomes evident when one recognizes that the silence pursued by both Ando and Wittgenstein stands in opposition to that of Adolf Loos, whose silence amounts largely to a rejection of semiotic ornament. As Hubert Damisch observes, Loos’s “desire for emptiness” led him to repudiate ornamental styles only to arrive, paradoxically, at a new and distinctive style of his own.³
What such an approach can never yield, however, is a genuine “form of life.” A form of life is not simply one style among others—not even a style produced through the negation of all previous styles—but rather a mode of expression that gives presence to the unspeakable. Wittgenstein would describe such a style as a quality that shows itself, in the manner of an image. Ando articulates a closely related view when he insists that it is space itself—rather than the concrete elements enclosing it—that must be allowed to “speak,” thereby giving rise to form. In this way, form or style is withdrawn from the sphere of practical calculation and allowed to emerge as an expression of silence itself.
Ito House (Ando)
For this reason "impractical" people like Wittgenstein and Ando are more predestined to find such a style than a practical person like Loos. Loos was an artist creating "for life" by developing outspoken ideas about lifestyles. Wittgenstein and Ando are craftsmen who work in silence, creating places that cannot be grasped by language but only "felt" as images.
Koshino House (Ando)
Body Architecture, Architecture as Gesture
To say that images are “felt” here is to suggest that they are grounded in a relationship with the body. This embodied dimension is central to any appreciation of the architecture of both Wittgenstein and Ando. Ando emphasizes “architecture’s physical, carnal quality, or (…) the labyrinthine quality of the body” [4], foregrounding the corporeal experience of space. Wittgenstein, for his part, claims that “architecture is a gesture,” implying that any form of life articulated through architecture must be internalized bodily [5]. Gestures are, by nature, bodily expressions, and it is precisely this embodied quality that ultimately distinguishes architecture from language.
Church of Light (Ando)
Ando’s reevaluation of the Japanese notion of shintai—often translated as “body-spirit”—pursues a comparable effort to articulate the world through the body. Architecture, he argues, renders ways of living more “profound” (a claim he makes with reference to the traditional Japanese tea house), precisely because, as a bodily practice in its own right, it inevitably acts upon the body. In this sense, a “form” or “style” of life is not grounded in rationality as it is conventionally understood; rather, it generates its own mode of rationality. It is evident how closely this perspective resonates with the thought of Wittgenstein [6].
Langen Foundation, Hombroich, Germany (Ando)
Dream
When Ando describes the body as an “oneiric prison,” he gestures toward a pursuit of “purity exceeding function”—a purity that closely resembles the peculiar logic, or quasi-functionality, at work in dreams. This affinity finds a striking parallel in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who writes of dreams: “What impresses us in a dream is not its causal connection, but rather the fact that it is like a story (…) whose rest remains in the dark” [7]. It is precisely this partial, shadowed “story”—detached from a fully articulated linguistic structure—that is capable of generating its own internal logic.
A German journalist once remarked that walking through the Wittgenstein House evokes the sensation of moving through the strange, dreamlike corridors of films by Andrei Tarkovsky. For Tadao Ando as much as for Wittgenstein, the deliberate restriction of expression to an internal structure that is at once austere and intricate produces a sense of purity. This purity diverges from that of modernist aesthetics; instead, it recalls the experiential density and inward coherence characteristic of dreams.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Stonborough House
Notes
1. Cf. P. Wijdefeld: Wittgenstein Architect (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994); G. Gebauer (ed.): Wien Kundmanngasse 19. Bauplanerische und Philosophische Aspekte des Wittgenstein-Hauses (Munchen: Fink, 1982); B. Leitner: "La Maison Wittgenstein" in J. Clair (ed.): Vienne 1880-1938. Apocalypse joyeuse (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1986); J. Bouveresse: "Wittgenstein et l'architecture" (in op. cit).
2. For rapprochements of Wittgenstein and Eastern philosophy see my article "Nishida and Wittgenstein: From Pure Experience to Lebensform or New Perspectives for a Philosophy of Intercultural Communication" in Asian Philosophy 13:1, 2003. See also Paul Wienpahl's article from 1958, "Zen and the Work of Wittgenstein" (Chicago Review 12:2), in which the author explains the coincidence of Wittgenstein's complete clarity or simplicity with the Zen notion of no-mind: "Wittgenstein said: For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear" (P.I., 133). Of a master, it is reported: when asked what he was doing sitting cross-legged quietly, Yao-shan said: "Thinking of that which is beyond thinking." "How do you go on with thinking that which is beyond thinking?" asked a visitor. Yao-shan: By not-thinking." (p. 70-71)
3. H. Damisch: "L'autre Ich ou le desir du vide: pour un tombeau d'Adolf Loos" in Critique 1975, Nr. 339-340 (aug.-sept.), p. 811.
4. Ando: "Representation and Abstraction" in F. Dal Co: Tadao Ando Complete Works (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 454.
5. Wittgenstein: Vermischte Bemerkungen: Werkausgabe Vol. 8 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), p. 510 (1942).
6. A related principle we find perhaps only in Paul Virilio's "oblique architecture" of the 1960s that was meant to turn human dwellings into a permanent training ground for the body. See Sylvère Lotringer & Paul Virilio: The Accident of Art (New York, Semiotext(e), 2005): "Buildings would be entirely made of inclined planes that required a special effort, and would make sure that we would remain conscious of our concrete existence through obstacles in everyday life. Consumerism was beginning to make everything abstract and insubstantial - merely comparing signs - and [Paul Virilio was] rushing in emergency remedial features. Oblique architeture was a version of Artaud's theater of cruelty, a modernist strategy meant to counter people’ increasing absorption in a universe of signs and images. A spiritual antidote to the Society of the Spectacle" (p. 44-45).
7. VB, p. 547 (1948). For Wittgenstein's general attitude towards dream see my article "The Dream of Language: Wittgenstein's Concept of Dream in the Context of Style and Lebensform" in The Philosophical Forum 34:1, 2003, pp. 73-90.
For photos of Japanese Brutalism go here
