BACK TO THE ROUGH GROUND
HAUS WITTGENSTEIN Li-Chi Pan Haren Dias
MENDING WALL -ROBERT FROST
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him, But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me~ Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father’s saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.
THE PRELUDE Back to the Rough Ground: Haus Wittgenstein
Objectified by its careful placement on a ‘plinth’, similar to the placement of religious artefacts on a church altar; the Haus Wittgenstein sits separately, a wall away from the rest of its surrounding neighbourhood. Robert Frost explores this idea of the wall in his poem, “Mending Walls”. Here he talks of society, the dangers we impose on one another and the need for boundaries. However, this opens other avenues of thought: If one constructs a wall to protect oneself; we may assume it is to protect oneself from ones’ neighbours, but we must also consider the idea that one may construct a wall to protect ones’ neighbours from oneself. Robert Frost confronts this notion, when he writes: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.” With a wall or in this case, ‘the plinth’; the Haus Wittgenstein, undoubtedly sits within its own walled compound, with its access and orientation carefully thought out. What it is trying to keep out or keep in is something to be considered. As for the house, it sits handsomely, perched upon the ‘plinth’ completely separate to the rest of the neighbourhood. With a geometrical tranquillity the house is a silent reminder of a sacred creation. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s approach to his architecture was strictly functional. Everything had to be redesigned for the utmost simplicity. The
House stood as an image of absolute purity, as Wittgenstein believed, human life should be imagined. He never believed in ornamentation of any kind, in fact he forbade his sister to decorate the house as she saw fit. The house was usually sparsely fitted out and the finishing was simple; even the light bulbs were left naked and bare. He saw ornamentation as the “vanities of this world” and that “we all wanted to find a way to be admired”; this was Wittgenstein’s understanding. The Question. In the wake of this thinking, we must be critical of Wittgenstein’s architecture; what is he striving to achieve with his walls and his clinical, functional architecture? For this, we may need to delve in to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s past. Born the youngest of eight children into one of the most influential families in Vienna at the time, the Wittgenstein family has been described as “a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders.” Starting with Leopoldine Wittgenstein, his mother, who was “an emotionally frigid mother and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality has been violently erased”, almost all of her children grew up with problems. Almost all the males of the family “were seized from time to time by bouts of uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.” This was most apparent in Karl Wittgen-
stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father, who is described to have been “a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook”; whose wife once had to lay awake all night in agony and pain from an injury, afraid to move in the fear of waking up her irascible husband. Throughout his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein lived a varied and somewhat colourful life. Following in his father’s footsteps, Wittgenstein started his studies in mechanical engineering at Technische Hochschule, Berlin in 1906; where he developed an interest in aeronautics. This saw him pursue a doctorate at the Victoria University of Manchester in the spring of 1908, resulted in some success when he landed some patents for his work in the field of propeller jet engines.
David Pinsent’s tragic plane crash; the rejection of the publication of his first Tractatus and nine months as a prisoner of war in an Italian jail left him on the brink of suicide. Upon returning home he enrolled in teacher training college and divided his sizable fortune among his siblings. By 1920, Wittgenstein was teaching as a school teacher in rural Austria, it was during this time that he completed his Tractatus, which was finally published in German in 1921. In 1926, Wittgenstein resigned from his final post as a school teacher and had been working again as a gardener for a monastery in Hütteldorf, Austria; when his sister, Margaret, invited him to help with the design of her new townhouse on Kundmanngasse in Vienna.
It was during this time that he became interested in the foundation of mathematics which he pursued under the guidance of Bertrand Russell at the University of Cambridge in 1911. However, he started to feel his time at Cambridge was counter-productive and in 1913, decided to retreat to the village of Skjolden in Norway. At the outbreak of the First World War, Wittgenstein volunteered for the AustroHungarian Army despite being eligible for medical exemption; he excelled in the military, being awarded medals for valour and courage.
The House on Kundmanngasse, was an opportunity for Wittgenstein to create something from the ground up; which he did, when he completely took over the project once involved.
1918 was a particularly bad year for Wittgenstein, starting with the death of his uncle; his brother Kurt committed suicide (the third of his brothers to do so); he got news of his friend
The Methodology In order to build on Wittgenstein’s work we need to understand him –who and what he was. Our best line of enquiry may be in his
By creating his own world, Wittgenstein had complete control over everything; the scale, the materiality and the overall experience – a complete Utopia designed by Wittgenstein himself. Or was it more of a Potemkin village? A barrier, a mask; hiding something deeper within?
work; Wittgenstein produced a surprisingly limited amount of work throughout a much varied and interesting lifetime. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, produced during his time at Cambridge University was one such piece of work. The English translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus written by Wittgenstein was first published in 1922. No philosophical classic is harder to master than the Tractatus. The difficulty is partly due to the extreme compression of Wittgenstein’s oracular remarks. Within the span of some twenty thousand words there are comments on the nature of the universe and the essence of language, the foundations of mathematics and logic as well as revolutionary ideas about philosophical methodology. Wittgenstein said: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who himself has already had the thoughts that are expressed in it – or at least similar thoughts.” The Tractatus is a web, in which every thought is interconnected with one another and it is this philosophy that is reflected in his architecture. The boldest summary of this piece of Wittgenstein’s work reads; “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, everything is as it is and everything happens as it does happen. In it no value exists. God does not reveal himself in the world. Feeling the world as a limited whole, it is this that is mystical.” In order to realise the world that was created
by Wittgenstein we need to position ourselves to look inwards rather than outwards at his world. We need to escape the bounds of the Haus Wittgenstein; the site and the architecture and then look to reconnect externally. His world being the house which achieved a perfection he was obsessed with and which he was unable to project on the external world. Going so far as moving a ceiling incrementally to adhere to his strict architectural ratio. The Resolution. To escape is to remove oneself from one’s surroundings. As humans, we adapt. One such mechanism for escape are tunnels. The existence of man-made underground pathways and networks has been prevalent throughout our history, none more so than in Vienna. Vienna’s tunnel network has existed since the Dark Ages and was fundamental to the city’s functioning. In modern times, the tunnels have become associated with a darker side of the city. Since the Second World War the location and collective knowledge about the tunnels has fallen from public memory. Tunnels can be thought of as the escape from and the return to the site, an idea which has fascinated us and influenced our scheme. To tunnel underground, allows us to leave Wittgenstein’s world intact but still able to return once more to experience it. At the same time be able to open up the Wittgenstein to Vienna and the world from the outside in.
‘He (Wittgenstein) liked the idea of a silent religion. Silence tells no lies. Silence does not deceive.’ -LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, AUSTRIA.
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he project, Back to the Rough Ground: The Ludwig Wittgenstein Institute, calls for an engagement with the though and architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1989-1951) -- An Austrian-British philosopher working principally in the areas of logic and the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein, who studied and taught at Cambridge, is generally considered one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, although he published remarkable little in his lifetime. His philosophical writings, collected mostly in unedited notebooks, are scattered with architectural references and metaphors, evidencing an abiding interest in architecture. This interest extended briefly into practice when in 1926 he designed an enigmatic house for his sister Margaret Stonborough in Vienna, which has come to be known as Haus Wittgenstein. This austere and carefully calibrated house provides both the site and thematic background for the proposed Ludwig Wittgenstein Institute, which will be an international focus for Wittgenstein
studies, housing archives, a specialist library, seminar rooms, administration areas, a cafe, and accommodation for visiting scholars. In order to accommodate this expansive program it will be necessary to occupy much of the confined inner-city site in addition to the house itself, necessitating a carefully considered position in regards to the integrity of the original building versus contemporary demands. Whilst ultimately requiring a studied response to issues of site, context and program, the project is principally seen as an opportunity to explore deeper issues around thought, language and architectural embodiment, orientated by Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which itself is deeply concerned with the limits of that which can be logically explained in language and that which ‘must be passed over in silence.’ The pithy clarity of his early work on logic, as presented in the seminal Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has appealed to Modernists, whilst his very different later work on philosophies of language and of mind.
HAUS WITTGENSTEIN CONSTRUCTED AT 1:100 SCALE.
BASEMENT LEVEL SCALE 1:200
1. Main Archive 2. Reading Rooms 3. Storage
FIRST FLOOR
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he basement level will house and archive much of Wittgenstein’s work and would be easily accessible to scholars. The elevator will be extruded six meter’s below ground level. On the First floor will be a cafe which opens out to a garden terrace and overlooks the grid of skylights in the grass field. The reception area will be located in room eight and will receive direct sunlight whilst area six will be a more private dining for scholars. As this is the only architectural design to have ever been built by Wittgenstein in order to commemorate and preserve his legacy minimal changes will be done to the home and its surroundings.
FIRST FLOOR
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he first floor will compromise of guest bedrooms for scholars who will be living in the Wittgenstein House. Each bedroom will receive direct sunlight and will have a private bathroom. We hope to make use of the first and second floor as private circulatory spaces which can only be accessed by the scholars in the house.
Communal study spaces have also been provided on both the first and second floors for the inhabitants of the Wittgenstein House. The elevator will allow scholars to access the archive on the basement level and to the study spaces on the subterranean level. The second floor allows the scholars to access the balcony and to have a view into the gardens.
SECOND FLOOR
1. Balcony 2. Storage 3. Balcony 4-7. Guest Scholar Room
HAUS WITTGENSTEIN Context, Program & Site Analysis
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he Ludwig Wittgenstein Institute is to be incorporated onto the site of the original Haus Wittgenstein on Kundmanngasse in central Vienna. Whilst the house remains largely intact as an artefact, its site and the surrounds have been significantly altered around it over time, considerable compromising the original architectural intent and experience. Embracing this difficult situation as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the relationship between the house and its urban surroundings and considering ways to inhabit, reconfiguring and extending the house as part of the Institute. Having revised the program in line with our vision for a contemporary philosophical institute - we decided to preserve the Wittgenstein House and celebrate its architectural achievement and create a subterranean architecture which could potentially link all the surrounding educational facilities. The program
is to house an archive of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, notes, photographs and drawings; a general library for philosophical works, exhibition areas, seminar rooms, administration areas, accommodation for visiting scholars and architects and a cafe. The Wittgenstein House is surrounded by Parkgasse, Kundmanngasse & Geusaugasse in the third district of Vienna. It is surrounded by other educational institutions on a macro-scale - a high school, a middle school, a music school and an existing library are all located within close proximity to the house. In creating links between facilities and providing for a shared usable space, we would be able to provide for a more holistic program than what was previously as requested by the brief. The Wittgenstein House itself will function purely as a philosophical institute where scholars may lodge. It is the rest of the scheme that will help connect the external Vienna to the Haus Wittgenstein.
MICRO SITE ANALYSIS
MACRO SCALE 01. High school 02. School of Music 03. Wittgenstein House 04. Middle School 05. Library
HAUS WITTGENSTEIN, LANDRESSE 3
ANT TUNNELLING SYSTEMS Inspiration for design process.
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s with all below-ground schemes it is important to identify a methodology for the design and construction that is coherent with the total design. Humans are relatively inexperienced to the concept of underground living and burrowing as it is not something we are accustomed to as a day-to-day way of dwelling. This is when we decided to look elsewhere; natural underground biological systems have existed for longer than humans have ventured below ground. One such system, ant tunnelling is something that intrigued us and suited the purposes of the scheme. The goal was to understand how these network structures emerge from the tunnel growth dynamics and apply similar methodology this scheme. We began analysing a standardized two dimensional set-up shaped as a disk and studied the characteristics of tunnel growth in terms of initiation. It was evident that in a circular shaped containers the tunnelling patterns were more concentric in pattern and
in a more square shaped container the patterns are more orthogonal. But more importantly ant tunnelling dynamics dictated that they started working from the outside in – something that was unique to our approach. Ants nest are formed from a number of chambers interconnected by a network of galleries and are heavily influenced by the location and the size of the food sources. When an ant finds food, it can follow its own pheromone trail back to the nest. On the way back to the nest, the ant lays down more pheromones in order to create a stronger trail with an even stronger scent. In order to recreate ant nesting patters, we modified a swarm script using Python to simulate the movements. Having mapped out the food sources as other educational facilities as mapped out during the macro site analysis, we allowed the simulation to run, generating a series of nesting patterns. These iterations formed the basis for the final subterranean architectural design.
DISK GEOMETRY
EXPERIMENTS
MODEL
SQUARE GEOMETRY
EXPERIMENTS
MODEL
ANT SIMULATION
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hese diagrams represent a variation of the location of the various food sources. Allowing the swarm script to generate alternative tunnelling schemes. These tunnelling schemes gave us a better appreciation as to how these ants tunnelled and further assisted in the process of generating a usable architectural floor plan. It must be noted that the floor plan was not generated off a single simulation, rather it was an amalgamation of the best schemes that
TUNNELLING SCHEMES
Various floor plans generated off swarm script created by Python. DIAGRAMMATIC VARIATION
SWARM SCRIPT PYTHON USED TO GENERATE ANT TUNNELS
EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES MAPPED OUT AS ‘FOOD SOURCES’ WITH SWARM SCRIPT OVERLAID
DIAGRAM EXTRACTED FROM OUR ANT SIMULATION
ROOF PLAN
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e chose to preserve the work of the Ludwig Wittgenstein by keeping all alterations to the house to a minimum. Internally, the only the partition walls were moved around to create the required functionality. On the exterior, the house itself is untouched; a grid of skylights laid out in the garden that transforms the whole space, playing off the austerity of the surroundings. The 1.5m diameter skylights provide for natural ventilation as well as a source of natural lighting for any program that may lay
below the surface. The conical structures which have been mapped out above represent openings into the Underground scheme. Directly influenced by the Joanneum Museum by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and eep architekten, these conical entrances are similar to the skylights, as they allow for natural ventilation and lighting, in addition to its function as an entrance. These spaces also become impromptu performance spaces and public gathering areas.
GRID SKYLIGHTS ALLOW FOR PEOPLE TO WALK ON A UNIQUE GARDEN.
SUBTERRANEAN FLOOR PLAN
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he subterranean floor plan was generated and inspired by the natural tunnelling system used by ants and formulated through a simulator named Python. When we began delving into a subterranean architecture we wanted to turn to nature for inspiration and discovered that ants had one of the most interesting tunnelling methods. The Wittgenstein Institute is of a rigid and stoic nature where meticulous detail and symmetry resonates throughout the building.
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n order to create a subterranean architecture which was organic and had an obvious contrast to the rigid nature of the institute which was situated on a plinth above ground. The layout of the circular skylights is in harmony with the architecture of the house. As you take the elevator from the basement down the tunnels turn into an organic circulatory space which connects the surrounding educational buildings into one central hub which can be shared amongst the scholars as well as students.
CIRCULATORY TUNNELS
SECTIONAL MODEL SKYLIGHT DETAIL
ORGANIC POD
‘The sense of the world must lie outside of the world. In the world, everything is as it is.’ -LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, WAR HERO.
INTERIOR ATMOSPHERIC RENDER EARTHLY TONE CREATING AN ENJOYABLE SPACE FOR VISITING SCHOLARS AND STUDENTS.
RAMMED EARTH FINISH
JOANNEUM MUSEUM Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and Eep Architekten
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avernous holes in the courtyard of three museum buildings in Graz, Austria, lead underground into a new, shared entrance. Glass surrounds the conical openings and each one tunnels down through one or two storeys to bring diffused natural light into the underground rooms. Further explanation from Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos: The ground surface, the horizontal platform upon which most of our movements in the city occur, is very rarely the generating argument or the spatial support of a project. Perhaps as a result of that yearn for an identity that every new intervention seems to demand, architecture has tended to express itself throughout history by means of objects, volumes that have often established a difficult relationship with the scale of the urban environment in which they were inserted. In contrast, the extension of the Joanneum Museum emerged from the intention of acting within the strict limits of the horizontal plane of the city, offering a new public space based on an architectural proposal that is paradoxically simple in its depth and complex in its surface.’ Interested with the concept behind the Joanneum Museum of ‘surface and depth,’ we decided to apply this architectural idea to our subterranean architecture. The cavernous holes in the courtyard could be used to link the existing educational facilities around the Wittgenstein Institute to the underground tunnels. The glass surrounding the openings would bring in natural lighting. We have replaced the escalator with a spiral staircase leading down toward the tunnels. The conical openings will illuminate and bring in indirect sunlight. This is a fundamental element in our design as it links in with our idea of a grid skylight system which will also allow for diffuse sunlight into the building.
Skylight Detail
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Wittgenstein Institute in a stark white, cast from plaster. Subterranean architecture emits an ephemeral quality. FINAL MODEL.
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Plaster, Perspex, Ink and Light Box Installation. SITE MODEL, SCALE 1:200
PHASE ONE. LABYRINTH. UNDERWORLD INSPIRED BY THE NEED TO ESCAPE THE POTEMKIN VILLAGE THAT IS THE WITTGENSTEIN HOUSE
EXPLORATIVE MODEL
A labyrinth-inspired underground world was initially explored in phase one. PHASE 1
PHASE TWO.EXCAVATION. LOOKING AT ORGANIC TUNNELLING SYSTEMS AND CARVING TUNNELS TO CREATE CIRCULATORY UNDERGROUND SPACES.
EXPLORATIVE MODEL
Exploration of organic forms and undulating tunnelling systems. PHASE 2
BIBLIOGRAPHY Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. Hachette UK, 2012. Beller, Steven. Rethinking Vienna 1900. Edited by Steven Beller. Berghahn Books, 2001. Carlini, Maurizio. Determining the Optimum Section of Tunnels Using Ant Colony Optimization. 2010. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2013/320360/ (accessed October 07, 2014). D. L. Hawksworth, Alan T. Bull. Arthropod Diversity and Conservation. Springer Science & Business Media, 2007. Davis, Mathew. “The Laconic Response: Spartan and Athenian Mindsets in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”.” Oxford Journal (Literary Imagination ), 2005. Engelmann, Paul. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967. Fraser, John. The European Graduate School. 2010. http://www.egs.edu/library/ludwig-wittgenstein/biography/ (accessed October 14, 2014). Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. Edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Henry Holt and Company, 1979. Hans D. Sluga, David G. Stern. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Joanneum Museum extension by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and eep architekten.” De Zeen Magazine, Jan 2012. Last, Nana. Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space, & Architecture. Fordham Univ Press, 2008. Leitner, Bernhard. The Wittgenstein house. Edited by Bernhard Leitner. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000, 2007.
Levin, Simon A. “Shape transition during nest digging in ants.” Princeton University Press (Princeton University), 2009. Little, Michael R. Bloom’s How to Write about Robert Frost. Edited by Harold Bloom. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Olus L. Barnes, Norbert J. Nerney. The red harvester ant and how to subdue it. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture,, 1953. Preston, John. http://www.wittgensteinchronology.com/ (accessed October 07, 2014). Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey. Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts. Psychology Press, 2001. The Famous People. http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/ludwig-wittgenstein-287.php (accessed October 06, 2014). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. Cosimo, Inc, 2010.
IMAGE REFERENCING Roland Halbe, 2012, Joanneum Museum extension, photographs viewed 12 August 2014, < http://www. museum-joanneum.at/>.