The Crystal Order That Is Most Concrete: The Wittgenstein House

by Hui Zou

Introduction

In the instruction of architectural history, some historical references have to be mentioned in terms of the relationship between building and language. In Chapter I, Book II, of The Ten Books on Architecture, the ancient Roman theorist Vitruvius discussed the "origin of the dwelling house." According to him, the "primitive hut" originated from the gathering of men around a fire through communicating in language. In the primitive hut, the origin of architecture was co-presented with the origin of language; the language helped establish a harmonic relationship, which developed builders' construction collectivity. Such a language-collectivity relationship was witnessed in the record of the Tower of Babel in the biblical scripture where the Lord decided to stop the human beings' construction of the tower by "confus[ing] their language there." During the Renaissance, the alphabetic language and the design of buildings were correlated through the application of geometry that was supposed to embody the "divine proportion." In the Franciscan professor Luca Pacioli’s book On Divine Proportion, letters of the alphabet were geometricized to become objects of contemplation for tracing "God's light." In Chinese gardens, there has been a long tradition of naming a specific view with a poetical phrase that thematicized the scene into a meaningful unity of the view and the viewer—jing. In all these historical cases, language and building were integrated into a cosmological picture grounded in divine transcendence.