Inhabiting before building

It is curious to note the case of Wittgenstein, the most architectural, who, after the First World War, cut himself off from the family fortune, a tremendous amount in a family in which, for example, his sister Margarethe was portrayed by Gustav Klimt himself. Wittgenstein wanted to know the gravity, the effort of a person who works for a living (he, who had been a millionaire from birth) and becomes a teacher in a mountain village. He also abandons that activity, for reasons which I will leave for the reading of the book, and becomes (in six months) an architect together with his friend Paul Engelmann, whom he had met in the war, and who was a pupil of Adolf Loos. Together, but with the determined and obstinate participation of the philosopher, they built a house in Vienna for Ludwig's family. The plans were signed by both of them.

Wittgenstein had everything changed and gave the orders in the course of the work. The author, Eilenberger, tells us that it is not so strange, that Kant speaks of his works as an "Architectonics of Reason" and that Goethe's Faust in the second part of the work, the properly philosophical one, plays the role of the architect... But the philosopher sought perfection in what was built, more in keeping with mathematics than with construction. When the work was being cleaned up, he had the ceiling of a room pulled down to raise it by three centimetres because that way one could really feel at ease... I remember years ago, reading his aphorisms, that I was struck by the beauty of a naked bulb without a lamp, which we see in the exposed wires of his palace. Now, it seems a foretaste of minimalism, or a search for sobriety, the stripping of ornament, as his fellow countryman Loos had written in Ornament and Crime.

The building that accompanies the figure of Cassirer is the Warburg Library in Hamburg, where the philosopher regularly went. There, under a vault of light, the books were divided into orientation-image-word-action. This particular collection, which was of great importance, left in 1933 for London with the intention of never returning.

Benjamin was a wandering writer, and rather than a specific home, the author took him to Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and Capri, like the flanneur he was, though always with the intention of learning Hebrew and heading for the Promised Land. Of course, his veneration for the passages of Paris also denotes an architectural inclination that he left written down.

And I close with Heidegger, who built his house, his hut, which formed part of the exhibition and later book (Cabañas para pensar, seen at the Seoane Foundation 2011, also at Cerezales 2015 and at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid), which also featured Wittgenstein's thinking hut in Norway (1914), which Eilenberger does not include in his book (as he focuses on 1919-29). Well, at this point in the construction of his house by a 38-year-old Heidegger, Eilenberger says, as if in passing, something that seemed to me to be worth the whole book: "Dwelling precedes building". As you read it, it strikes you as a mistake of dyslexia or translation and, when you analyse it, you realise how necessary it is to feel the place before you put the first stake in it, before you unleash in your head the first dream of a new place to think.


 Ludwig Wittgenstein Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger