…There is a pervasive misunderstanding about the nature of the man and his thought that the architecture at first sight reinforces. The conventional caricature is of a übernerd: loveless, narrow, isolated, endlessly obsessing over minutiae of logic that have little bearing on real philosophy and certainly none on creative life in general. His thought is pictured is an ascetic ultra-reductionism, bizarrely focused on a normally transparent layer of reality—the interface between thought and language—at the exclusion of everything else. An engineer by trade, he seems a mere engineer in thought, needlessly mechanising what the rest of us find perfectly automatic already. And the architecture seems similarly arid and mechanical, preoccupied with technical solutions to problems no one notices, such as how to incorporate a catch in a purely cylindrical door handle, or shutter a window without breaking the panel in two. Everything else—life—seems to be left out; here is a building not to dwell in, not even to build: it is a superfluity on the technical drawings alone. For W here seems not just at war with ornament—the building has none of the natural, unfussy comfort Loos always seeks—he seems profoundly careless of the humanity the building is meant to enclose.

The reality is very different. W was supremely charismatic, intense, sensitive, passionate. He was richly cultured, as deft with art addressed to the emotions as with arguments addressed to the intellect; even F. R. Leavis, though deploring of his influence on others, testifies in a an anecdote to his critical insight when given, a prima vista, a complex poem to analyze. Far from narrow, W’s thought is both broader in range and method than anyone before him in modern times and more closely relevant to the intimacies of human experience. For what he shows, repeatedly, from a hundred different angles, with effortless power and fluidity, is that human experience cannot be simplified, constrained, short-circuited, explained away in the manner his predecessors (and successors) in vain pursuit of grandeur thought it could. And in doing so he gave us the means to resist not just the tyranny of those who insist on a particular morality but also those who insist on none, not just those who proscribe a particular way of thinking but those who allow any and all, not just those who limit the passions but also those for whom the passions know no check. He did so not in pursuit of moderation but in denial of the reduction of life, of its subjugation to the intellect, of its embodiment in a rule; he did it in the spirit of reverence for life. That the study of logic was his means to that conclusion is an accident of his particular war: that is where the critical battle happened to be waged, and that is therefore the battlefield he entered. His attack was in the realm of the abstract precisely so as to free the particular, the point of his writing, as he said so himself, was ultimately in what he left out. The real Wittgenstein is the obverse of what we see, his real kinship—to take contemporaries—is not with Russell but with D.H. Lawrence.

So conceived, W’s architecture becomes something else. The purity and simplicity are not an attempt to straightjacket life, to coerce it into obeying some abstract law of spatial organisation, but to leave it free to play, to leave the surroundings out of its way. The point of the engineering is not to displace the human into the mechanical—as a computer does—but to make the mechanical transparent to the human act. W is not in thrall to mechanisms; his engineering is invisible, he even sadistically bends the radiators into the corners, to teach them their place. There is no fetish about materials here: artificial, not natural, stone is used for the floors, cut into precise geometries tailored to each room that can only be the will of man. W’s architecture recognizes that a house stands to its inhabitants as a picture frame stands to the canvas it encloses: it should take nothing away, and it should add only what is already there.