The Facade

The outer walls of our modern buildings are our prison walls, for they are anonymous, without emotions, aggressive, heartless, cold and yawningly empty. These are the freedom-depriving characteristics of prison walls. Behind anonymous walls, concentration-camp inmates with no window rights are lodged.

In a house, an individually different, organic design of the outer wall of each individual apartment is of fundamental significance, so that the resident can identify with his house from the outside. My irregular outside design of the apartments is not protected as an historic monument, but is to be looked on as a precursor to the window right of every individual.

Every house within the house has a colour of its own on the outer façade, made of coloured finishing plaster. The dark-grey borders of the finishing are rubbed into the coloured surface so that a gradual transition is achieved.

The apartments are red, blue, yellow, white, with dark borders. The public portions are grey: stairwells, lift shafts, corridors, winter garden, adventure room for children, café terrace, shops. The coloured apartments are bordered with ceramic lines. These ceramic borderlines of the apartments do not follow the T-squared grid of the apartments inside, but fake an organic irregularity on the outside which does not (yet) exist inside.

Hundertwasser, 1985