When different houses stand next to each other in a street, all having different window types, i.e., window races, for example an Art Nouveau house with Art Nouveau windows next to a modern house with unadorned square windows, followed in turn by a Baroque house with Baroque windows, nobody minds.

But should the three window types of the three houses belong to one house, it is seen as a violation of the racial segregation of windows. Why? Each individual window has its own right to life.

According to the prevailing code, however, if window races are mixed, window apartheid is infringed. Everything is there: racial prejudice, racial discrimination, racial policy, racial ideology, racial barriers, with fateful impact of window apartheid on man. The apartheid of window races must cease.

For the repetition of identical windows next to each other and above each other as in a grid system is a characteristic of concentration camps.

Windows in rank and file are sad, windows should be able to dance.

In the new architecture of satellite towns and in new administration buildings, banks, hospitals and schools, the levelling of windows is unbearable.

Individuals are never identical and defend themselves against these standardising dictates either passively or actively, depending on their constitution. Thus either with alcohol and drug addiction, exodus from the city, cleaning mania, television dependency, inexplicable physical complaints, allergies, depressions and even suicide, or alternatively with aggression, vandalism and crime.

A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm’s reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.

Hundertwasser, January 1990

Brick construction. Photo: Bernd Lötsch

An opponent of Hundertwasser and the house is standing next to me, about ten meters in front of the brick shell, and says, looking at the bricks, “Aren’t you ashamed to be building an anti-ecological concrete bunker?” Even though I show him the bricks, lead him to the brick wall and let him feel the bricks, he sticks to his opinion and publishes it in the newspaper.

I have nothing against concrete.

You can build fantastic things with concrete:

For example,
1. ships (ferrocement boats); they are very popular in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S. and smell like old cathedrals inside, right in the middle of the ocean.
2. As foundations for hanging gardens and forests on the roof way up in the urban desert.
3. Invisible streets in the city, with forests outside and inside etc.

I would have agreed to a concrete shell, too, to save money. But the City of Vienna decided to build the house in brick construction, of which Vienna has only a few.

The brick walls are, quite unusually, 38 cm thick. Three types of brick were used: for the walls with outer and inner finishing hollow bricks and new solid bricks; for the portions which would be visible, the roof terraces, old solid bricks taken from torn-down houses, bearing the imperial coat-of-arms.

Concrete was used for the foundation and the basement garage, for the ceilings, for the wooded terraces with one metre of soil on the roofs, for the gateway arch, for the overhanging parts and the café terrace. If one were to cut through the house horizontally at chest height, one would only encounter brick walls in the storeys.

Hundertwasser, 1985

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

Irregularities on the facade. Photo: Kurt Pultar

The barriers of beauty and the “non-regulated irregularities” and the spontaneous vegetation should be tolerated.

If, for example, vertical rain marks or rust streaks or dirt marks enliven the façade or spots form on the wall, this should be considered a beautiful and welcome addition.

A lot of homeless people slept in the house, and anonymous “artists” scribbled and smeared the walls. Vestiges of these unauthorised activities should be permitted to leave their traces behind in the house, too, just like the swallows’ and birds’ nests somewhere in the house and grass and trees growing somewhere that wasn’t planned or “authorised”.

Monogrammes and handprints of the bricklayers in the wet plaster finishing should be left there, also, just like the additional decorations somebody made somewhere else in the house.

The tolerance of the “non-regulated irregularities” is an important aspect of window right.

Sterile cleanliness, regulated egalitarianism, enforced conformity and monocultures in all their variations are not only death to all kinds of life, but also a symptom of the decline of our civilisation.

Hundertwasser, 1985

I designed eight window types which are of varying height and width and which are mounted irregularly in the walls, so that one gets the impression as if the windows were dancing of their own free will, without any regard to the rooms inside. All the windows have ceramic covering plates instead of the customary zinc sheeting; they are triple-glazed wooden windows in four colours: red, blue, black and natural-wood colour.

Almost all windows have the typical Viennese T-cross and a cap stone. Many windows have a coloured plaster bordering which blends in with the colour of the outer wall, symbolising window right.

If on a street different buildings with different window types (window races) stand next to one another, nobody says a thing about it, for example an Art nouveau house with Art nouveau windows, a modern building with rectangular windows, a Baroque house with Baroque windows.

But if these three window types are part of one building, this is regarded as an infringement on the racial segregation of windows, as an offence against the laws of window apartheid. Why? Every window has a right to exist in its own right.

Hundertwasser, 1985

Excerpt from the lease: “Welcome to the Hundertwasser House – the first house with window right.”

Lease

(…) 2. The tenant is entitled to exercise his “window right”. In accordance with the statement by Hundertwasser:

“A resident must have the right to lean out of his window and to refinish everything within arm’s reach on the outer wall, so that people can see from afar: »a free man lives there«”.

The tenant may refinish the outer wall of his apartment around the window in a creative and original way (…). The finishing as found upon moving in is not under legal protection. Within the framework of “window right” the tenant may also change the design by Hundertwasser, as this decoration is only intended as a precursor of window right (…).

Hundertwasser, 1985

Terrace with vegetation. Photo: Kurt Pultar

Not the ones hidden in the back, but the ones open to the street are a gift for everyone – for those, too, who do not live in protection beneath them, and for those who may not use the terraces. Terraces opening onto the street take away the house’s vertical aggressivity, street noise is lessened because the echo is no longer caught between the rows of buildings.

If the terraces are green and have trees on them, it is like a natural hill with people living in it. Walking through a city with ascending terraces is like wandering through a gentle, green valley.

On fourteen large and just as many small green surfaces and for the tree tenants in the house, 900 tons of dirt were carried up. Part of the terraces is publicly accessible, another part is private, and a third portion is reserved for spontaneous vegetation, i. e.; off limits, taboo for man. If one includes those portions of green surface lying beneath perpendiculars, more than 100 % of the ground plan is planted with greenery and trees. On the roof, nature was given back what the house had taken away from her.

First steps in the afforestation of the terraces. Photo: Bernd Lötsch

The trees take root between two 3 x 3 m large grids of thick, stainless-steel rods. Beneath them are three iron bars welded to form a triangle and, from the corners, the tree is braced until it has taken root in the grid. Beneath that are two root-resistant fleeces with pumice-like water storing below ceramic gravel in between, and beneath that a root-resistant foil on protective concrete, and only beneath that comes the actual layer of heat insulation, root-resistant foil and five layers of bitumen on the concrete tub, which is bevelled at the edges. This root-support system was developed by the garden architect Sepp Kratochwil.

Hundertwasser, 1985

Tree tenant. Photo: Hubert Kluger

They are a gift of the house to the outside world, for the people who pass by the house. Man gives voluntarily small territories of his dwelling space back to nature, from which we unlawfully appropriated and destroyed large areas. Behind the outside all and in front of the set-back windows, stainless-steel tubs were installed for three tree tenants.

The tree tenant tubs, which contain up to one cubic meter of dirt, have root baskets of thick stainless-steel rods so the roots can get a good hold.

Hundertwasser, 1985

It is a contrast to the colourful apartments and the hanging gardens. In the mirror tiles the moon or sun are reflected either very early or very late, as the wall faces north.

Hundertwasser, 1985

Mosaics in the staircase. Photo: Kurt Pultar

They came about as if by a miracle, sort of as a by-product of the tile paving: the mosaics on the walls, on the floor of the stairways and in the corridors – spontaneously, the way flowers and trees suddenly appear or creatures are born.

Instead of slavishly laying tiles one next to the other, the workmen created freer and freer forms. The tiles crept off the floor onto the wall and became pictures. Most of the mosaics just flowed out of Hermann’s hand. I participated in many of them myself, so that I can hardly say how much of Hundertwasser there is in each mosaic. In the meantime the creative enthusiasm had spread to all the pavers and bricklayers and asphalt layers, so that creative products can be found by nearly all of them on the inner and outer walls, on the floors of the corridors and stairways and on the asphalt at street level. From ten to twenty names would have to be listed. What a revolution, what an incredible leap from imposed art to the age of the creative workman.

Hundertwasser, 1985