…I maintain that this outstanding painter … is a weak number as an innovator of architecture! …

…Reviewing Hundertwasser’s models, it seems unreasonable to demand from urbanites, ‘asphalt children’ by conviction that they live intimately with chickens and cows. I have no desire to be self-sustaining! I don’t want to be imposed upon by nature at every turn! I want to be able to rush to the cinema right through the traffic noise and gasoline fumes (which could be reduced!) to watch a mystery story…

… to a revue that is now – what a humiliation! – playing next Hundertwasser’s Alpine cabin show. No compromises, please! I really don’t want to cavort in a farmer’s jacket across meadows, which in the pilots have been stacked in tiers on top of each other with apartments hanging underneath – and listen to bleating sheep …

…Don’t be deceived by the modern disguise of a bourgeois and bucolic idyll whiningly abandoning urban life through a completely inappropriate project that, if realized, would be controlled for a high price by a garden gnome!

Johann Muschik
(Kurier, October 10, 1972)

Friedenreich’s Hanging Gardens

…The strongest obstacle against this euphoric future: Hundertwasser’s municipal housing miracle will turn out to be much more expensive than the allocated funds permit…

…From the outset, Hundertwasser has as a matter of precaution relinquished his own fee…

(Kurier, January 20, 1980)

The Façade-Guru
The Right of the Longer Arm

…It is no longer a question of trees or no trees, cows on the roof or lambs in the yard, but rather that time and again a man is being proposed as a problem solver, who, endowed with the creative sensitivity of an artist, appears as an apostle of nature, a missionary of urban construction, and a simplifier of complex interdependencies, a man who is actually completely oblivious to the real problems…

…Hundertwasser has stylized himself as a Messiah of urban planning with a sure instinct for unearthing explosive new ideas and who, – what else is new? – conjures up apocalyptic visions, preaches regression and promulgates the idea of a simple life that can be an idyll only for those who can afford it…

… However, “Club 2” has nothing better to do than to let him propagate his ideas concerning window right, which would turn out to be the right of the longer arm and the realization of which would constitute an injustice to all those neighbors who might not be amused by the view.  We are curious, will the master appear ‘if one calls him’?

Until now, whenever issues became serious, he tended to confine himself to mere suggestions.

Harald Sterk
(AZ, July 10, 1980)

Regressive Utopias

…I never considered Hundertwasser an enemy but rather an interesting, albeit very ambivalent figure in the cultural scene, whose – and this is putting it mildly – regressive utopias provoke an explicit, distinct comment…

Harald Sterk
(AZ, July 19, 1980)

Neuschwanstein for Municipal Tenants

…Dressed in a brightly-colored shirt, he presented a colorful ‘gingerbread house’, “an oasis for humanness and nature”…

…Initially the participation of architects proved a bureaucratic advantage, when the Bureau of Architecture and Engineering – “those gutless pawns of their scrupulous clients” – protested to the Commissioner for Urban Planning, Rudolf Wurzer, with a design contract against the appointment of the ‘insulter of architecture’, Hundertwasser, it could be pointed out that the painter of colorful spiral houses had been only a consultant under Krawina’s construction management…

…the painter had already focused on a Neuschwanstein for consumers: Large windows of various sizes, onion domes and balconies, and a façade painted with loops, drops, and dabs. Hundertwasser’s involvement did not allow for more…

…The public-relations-conscious painter knows how to sell such “publicity architecture” (a Viennese architect) most effectively to the “housing dumb-asses”* (Hundertwasser about the inhabitants of “shitty neighborhoods”*). In a feature of the TV-2 program “Ten to Ten”, on September 30^th, Vienna’s by now world-famous post-war public housing project was referred to as a witness to Hundertwasser’s “grotto railcar façades”…

Horst Christoph
(Profil No. 41, October 6, 1980)

* Editorial annotation: Hundertwasser never used these two expressions …

Change Building Codes

…This project’s great advantage, said Mayor Gratz, lies in the fact, that rather than the proposal of numerous theoretical considerations to improve the quality of life, here, finally, a concrete, realizable idea is offered.  Also as in so many alternative approaches, technology is not vilified, but made usable…  Rules and regulations set by the building authorities may still result in changes to the house’s appearance.  However, if it should prove that existing building codes impede the development of a humane architecture, one ought to consider changing them, declared the City Councilor for Urban Planning and Construction Hatzl.

(Wiener Zeitung, October 1980)

Eco House – Residential Building Headed the Wrong Way
Luxurious Hundertwasser Project

Would the tens of thousands of curious onlookers who flocked around Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s ‘Eco House’ at City Hall on the Day of the Open Door have applauded his model as enthusiastically had they known what it would cost to translate his utopia into reality?

… The irregular arrangement of the windows proposed by the painter does not take into consideration the rooms that lie behind them…

… In this case the City Council is faced with the practical decision to either erect a costly monument to Mr. Hundertwasser, or to build new housing with affordable rents for tenants from economically weaker social classes…

(Bezirksjournal, Number 10/1980)

Flight of Fancy
Eco House – Flight of Fancy or An Alternative

…The method of “building from the exterior to the interior” confronted the architect consigned to the task of concretizing Hundertwasser’s ideas that had not taken into consideration any architectural concerns with problems that were not easy to solve…

(Bezirksjournal Landstraße, No. 11/1980)

Colors in Toilet-Brush Painting

…Terraced houses in densely built areas with high real estate prices are a pure waste …Trees are entirely wrong in such places: They require deep soil for root containment which increases costs for indispensable repairs caused by today’s negligent construction tremendously!…

…Cracked façades and open fire walls are an ugly sight – even if “decorated” in screaming colors with toilet-brush painting!… Playful turrets and frills and furbelows, are justifiable only historically and as an ensemble, should be a thing of the past…

…Randomly placed irregular windows are disquieting and architecturally displeasing. In the age of “standardized windows” they are hardly available!…

…Streets are not for playing, but serve the house’s transportational needs…

…Mr. Hundertwasser has received enough money for his “works” – even public funding, without our consent. Let him build such a house for himself in “Pepperland”, where he allegedly prefers to reside and spend our scarce foreign exchange, but not here and not with our taxes!

Dipl.-Ing. Karl Kraft
(Bezirksjournal Landstraße, No. 12/1980)

Hundertwasser Monument

Beautification Cosmetics

– Late Gaudi

…Compared to the first design, this (terraced structure) not only has the disadvantage of containing fewer apartments (approximately 50 as opposed to c. 75 in the block variant), but also that the quality of the individual apartments varies…

…The right angle is an anathema for Hundertwasser; he also considers regular façades an ill of civilization. His façade concepts are characterized by irregular window arrangements…

… Part of an ostensibly decorative thinking, – and he certainly doesn’t want to realize it – they are beautification cosmetics, Hundertwasser-décor, pure art that is not concerned with what is lying behind them.

This is precisely the source of the conflicts that have developed between the architect and the painter. Hundertwasser wanted to see the walls surrounding the terraces executed in a wave-like design, he proposed round edges for various details of the façades and wanted to see the portals shaped in the form of large arches although there was no constructional necessity for this. He also suggested that parts of the façades of the old Biedermeier houses that were to be demolished be included in the new façade almost as a spoliatory reference to the former buildings.

While Krawinka was able to accept the latter suggestion, he could not live with Hundertwasser’s remaining demands, which he considered to be historicizing formalism.

He thought such “late-Gaudi” untimely and refused to reproduce it. Furthermore, he could not identify with Hundertwasser’s window arrangements, sketched without regard to the rooms behind them independent of the fact that windows in various sizes pose technical problems…

…Either a Hundertwasser monument or viable housing with improved furnishing…

…Hundertwasser’s contribution in regard to our project is cosmetic, however, their dimensions are larger than usual and Hundertwasser’s demand less modest: He pretends his suggestions to be a contribution to architecture and will surely capitalize on it. Either as the builder of an apartment building… or as a martyr if the project fails…

Harald Sterk
(Wohnbau 9/80)

Cotoneaster Lead a Desolate Life

…This artificial ‘tree mountain’ will never be realized in this form for trees in Vienna need more humus than is projected on these terraces. The most that can be realized are the usual Cotoneaster coniferous wood arrangements in concrete containers that will as is common carry on a desolate life…

(Baumeister Zeitung, April 1981)

Crocodile in the Bathtub

… To let a “tree tenant” grow out of the window of an inner city apartment on the fifth floor borders on the mentality of keeping a crocodile in a bathtub…

Pia Maria Plechl

(Die Presse, May 18, 1981)

The Bio Castle

Eco House: Hundertwasser’s “bio castle” is a long time coming…

… The “bio castle” runs the danger of getting down to the level of an ordinary municipal building with a beautified façade and a few trees on the garden terraces …

as a result, the weight-bearing wall construction now runs laterally through the window openings, there are rooms without lighting – construction elements that can’t possibly be executed…

Gerhard Krause
(Kurier, August 14, 1981)

Neither Trendsetting nor Representative

It’s fair to say that the Hundertwasser House is neither trendsetting nor representative; it is a prestigious unique copy, costly in construction and maintenance – aloof from subsidized housing and without a genuine impact on acute housing problems.

(Die Presse, October 2, 1981)

Threat of Realization

Vienna Misses Out on An “Eco Chance”

…Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Eco House will not be exactly ecological. So why has it been prematurely named so?…

…His idea of an ecological building with a lot of green plants, his paradise in the big city, has turned Viennese…

…Vienna has an almost-Eco House in Viennese style. Or at least, it has been threatened with its realization …

Watschenmann
(Kurier, October 1, 1980)

Municipal Stillbirth

…Nevertheless, I can’t get rid of the idea that even a privately planned and well-thought-out Eco House in Vienna would have made more sense than this municipal stillbirth.

Watschenmann
(Kurier, November 13, 1982)

Hundertwasser’s Reponse

Neither an eco-house nor a bio-castle has ever been considered. It seems to have somehow been generated by the press and then been stereotypically copied again and again as though a runner is constantly introduced as a swimmer despite the runner’s protests that he is a runner and not a swimmer. In the end, the entire world is mad at the runner because he can’t swim but wants to run!

Hundertwasser in his response to Gerhard Schneider (Watschenmann)

(Kurier, November 13, 1982)

Positively Surprised

The heck with it! Much has been built uneconomically in Vienna, and certainly not ecologically, and one can always quarrel about taste…

…Hundertwasser’s Eco House can therefore only be a positive surprise …

Anton Bina
(Kurier, August 17, 1983)

The Hanging Municipal Gardens

Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s municipal hanging gardens and the enforcement of the “window right” and “unregulated irregularities” (according to the master), however, come at a price.

(Die Presse, March 6/7, 1982)

Shrinkage Project

A costly architectural “shrinkage project” of which only the “Potemkin façade” remains with nothing behind it…, irks Krawina.

Erwin Melchart
(Kronen-Zeitung, January 10, 1983)

Inhumane, Bad Architecture

For one week I have dreamt I was a tree. It wasn’t a beautiful, harmonious dream…

…I am very special, a Hundertwasser-tree. As such I decorate the ninth story of the Master’s Eco House in the Löwengasse, corner Kegelgasse in the third district. The ninth story is a height not really comfortable for people but is a nightmare for trees…

…Hundertwasser’s Eco House will not be the comparatively harmless case of a naïvely fatuitous façade and bluff architecture, which unfortunately has taken over in recent architecture. The stark shell construction, which in its project- and model state under these circumstances could have been judged leniently turns out to be a programmed municipal construction scandal. Even this kind of ‘allotment garden’ architecture as Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s propagative ideas have become widely known, lives from proper dimensions. But if these are distorted into gigantic dimensions – and a high-rise construction in some parts ten stories within its own ensemble – and cross situation is just that, then even the most steadfast garden gnome gets dizzy in the face of such grotesque disproportions, in other words, in the face of such an inhumane, bad architecture.

…In my dream as a tree on a wall projection on the ninth story there is a moment when those Soviet scientists, who are able to communicate with plants through sensory instruments, stand around me: I whisper my lament about the cruelty towards trees and demand to be replanted in the Prater…

…During the next best storm I let myself be blown down onto Löwengasse from the ninth floor. For the first time I felt in compliance with my “architect”: I was indifferent to the people down there …

Franz Manola
(Die Presse, August 11/12, 1984)

The Hundertwasser House is A Planned Disaster

The Daydream

…Hundertwasser’s Eco House is considered the new show-off project of the city of Vienna. Is it different from any other high-rise? Supposedly it is going to have a green roof, but it remains to be seen how the trees will manage to grow roots in the completely un-ecological reinforced steel shell. Perhaps they’ll share the fate of the small alibi tree, which Hundertwasser planted in the window of a gray office building and which can only be kept alive with intense irrigation…

…The interior architecture under the steel shell is no better than the desperate tree planting activities…

…Small, partly dark rooms can’t be considered the perfect solution of architectural utopia …

…The Hundertwasser House in Vienna is the most recent manifestation of a “cultural policy” that disfigures the city with a growing number of new banalities and monstrosities and as an alibi sets “artistic” dots of color into her grey-in-grey cityscape…

Franz Manola and Alfred Hütter
(WIENER, September 1984)

Urban Planning Slapstick

Gingerbread House Façades

Hundertwasser is an amiable “dreamer,” not always to be taken seriously …

Frank Geiser, Architect, Berne

…Urban architecture slapstick, gingerbread house façades, and a lot of publicity for Friedensreich emerge where prior to it good old buildings provided genuine free space…

Martin Zulauf, Architect, Berne

I envy the society and city council that is tolerant enough to facilitate such an experiment and integrate it into its environment.

Hans Hostettler, Architect and Planner, Berne
(from: Der Bund, Berne, August 18, 1984)

Over-exaggerated.

Rushing by and hardly noticing it

Since when does concrete bring green into houses?

…The content of the apartment building in the third district was debased, its form increasingly over-exaggerated. That it has hardly two of the same windows may be a good philosophy, but doesn’t guarantee quality residence…

…“Those who live in this house should be given priority and not those who are rushing by hardly noticing its façade…”

…Hundertwasser’s décor and “green scam” …

…“The building in its final form resembles a Potemkin village”…

(Architektur Aktuell, October 15, 1984)

The Eighth World Wonder so To Speak

Bio-Castle Potemkin Brand

Hundertwasser has joined the architects. It’s an architectural sensation, the eighth wonder of the world so to speak…

…The unusual excitement in the press corresponded to the unusual project. “He’s courageous,” marvels even the genteel guarded PRESSE…

…A “picturesque Italian mountain village” in the middle of the densely built up Austrian capital. Much more convincing than the eccentric exterior of Hundertwasser’s kitsch palace…

…For more than two decades, Hundertwasser remained unsuccessful as a wannabe architect…

…Not until the end of 1979 did he receive his great chance.  He received his great chance: Vienna’s recognition-craving administration ordered from its widely known son the design for a completely biological apartment block…

…The Viennese taxpayers justifiably felt as though they were pioneers. Onion domes yes or no, their eco-house promised to become a site of pilgrimage of environmental architecture, exemplary for World Postmodernism. But unfortunately, after loud proclamations, Hundertwasser’s revolution like so many others was buried quietly.

…Consequently Josef Krawina no longer wants to have anything to do with a bio castle of the brand Potemkin. Instead of genuine ecology he sees only slanted walls, instead of a new quality of life only dancing windows …

…Which painter on the entire face of the earth has ever been given the opportunity to build for himself such a huge and costly monument?

Inge Santner
(Die Weltwoche, Zurich, No. 44/ November 1, 1984)

Kitsch Cathedral

(Song and the Chime of Bells)

Oh commeth all children from near and from far

Break your piggy banks

This is how I like it.

This week it will happen, the Hundertwasser House receives the onion domes it deserves. The crowning of the originally ecological building as Kitsch Cathedral! Yet another attempt by the City of Vienna to set a milestone in social housing. The museum character of the façade gives this architecture its distinction; it truly turns into three-dimensional painting, a painting that is actually wrapping…

…With Viennese charm, Hundertwasser wants to encourage the tenants to include in the furnishing of their homes color irregularities and new forms…

Question: How is the interaction with Hundertwasser?

Bricklayer: Our interaction with Mr. Hundertwasser is very good; we have no complaints. He is a good colleague as it were.

Question: Is there no feeling like here comes the great artist telling us what to do and we have to do what he tells us to?

Bricklayer: Not at all, he comes in the morning and says: We should create this and that color in the fine plastering and he asks us how we are doing and so on.

Question: I’ve heard that he is constantly on the construction site. Is that not annoying?

Bricklayer: He is practically our leader, the façade foreman so to speak.

It is foremost the painter Hundertwasser who works on the construction site. Despite green roof terraces, winter gardens, and the use of biological healthy building materials ecological involvement is missing in the construction. The artist shows this much more clearly in the Hainburger Au.

As for the building: Something is not necessarily green simply because it’s described as being so.

Gerhard Hofer in the TV-News Program ORF – ZiB 1, December 22, 1984

Municipal Building: A Habitable Graphic

Vienna’s New Attraction

…The interest in the Hundertwasser House is an architectural success beyond compare…We have never experienced new architecture in this way…It can be exemplary, because it is provocative, one of a kind. It’s not architecture; it’s an invitation to reflect on architecture. Therefore it is one of the most important experiments in the history of human housing, a treasury of strange but useful thoughts …

Jan Tabor
(Kurier, June 16, 1985)

Living Green Deception

Kitsch or Art?

Absurdity or Utopia?

Little onion domes, irregularly arranged windows, uneven floors, green terraces, and a deliberately designed craggy exterior shell with coarse plastering, ceramic tiles, mirrors, and small pillars are actually masking the fact that the soft ecological shell has a tough core of reinforced concrete, that the consequent use of only “natural” building materials such as wood and brick was omitted as was the installation of ecological systems to generate energy and dispose of waste-water, from the solar cell to the humus toilet.

In short: Vienna’s first “Eco House” is by no means an ecological building despite opulently planned green rooms and terraces. Living Green Deception….

…“Today architects have really un-learned certain things,” ponders Heinz Hübl from the Viennese Engineering Commission: “I really don’t like this style, the blood-and-soil-architecture of the house, on the other hand it is quite revealing how the discomfort with technocracy and new building materials turns into its opposite, even into the sectarian.”…

…From the old Hundertwasser utopia … the décor survived the content…

Klaus Khittl
(Wochenpresse, May 14, 1985)

Onion Dome Instead of Humus Toilet

The Hundertwasser House reveals the dilemma of Vienna housing. The privileged snuggle under roof gardens while slums are growing across the Danube.

…Concrete hides under bright colors … Décor swallows the planning funds: Elevator technology under gold-plated onion dome, a wrought iron balcony, slanted little columns, red, blue and green …

…According to Seidler, prestigious projects such as the Hundertwasser House arouse a sense of inclusion for the culturally privileged.

Horst Christoph
(Profil No. 25, June 17, 1985)

Heavyweight Concrete Bunker

A Canary Island for Kakania

…Is it really going to be so bad? architects ask…

In several months the house will be completed. Then we will be occupied… with the built and habitable reality, examine and evaluate the architectural success or the carnivalesque failure…

…Already now an entrance fee should be charged for looking. The house is being seen as an example of the bizarre and the grotesque…

…A palace façade – vaguely indicated. Looking across the corner, a tower emerges in the background as though it had jumped from a badly drawn book of fairytales …

…The house wants to be a fairytale castle…

…Thus the Hundertwasser House is designed to deceive

… The Faraday cage of a building made with precast concrete slabs is pure concrete housing compared to the statically-conditioned heavyweight concrete bunker of this “Eco House” with “tons of humus” on the terraces which are, at the same time, heavy concrete apartment ceilings. Concrete is cold and inhumane, one likes to say. Here it is round and colorful and calls itself ecological…

…The Hundertwasser House falls into the slightly tendentious category of awkward Prater architecture…

…The grotto rail in the Löwengasse… To every Austrian village its Eco-Neuschwanstein! You pay entrance with the Calafati-Schilling– and the city’s finances will be restored.

Dietmar Steiner
(Die Presse, June 1985)

Vienna Mocks the Hundertwasser House
Garden Gnomes Are Missing

…Whether the building will endure decades, like the Loos House, only the future will tell. The cheerful colors of the façade will certainly become muted by the big city grey. But the crazy house will always remain interesting – as one of the few attempts to create something independent in Vienna’s architecture…

Erik G. Wickenburg
(Die Welt, July 10, 1985)

A Dream of a House

From afar the thing appears like a mirage. And even more so from close up …

…Amidst the otherwise gray ocean of houses in the third district color artist Hundertwasser erected a revolutionary social housing project, an eight-story-high declaration of war, overgrown with trees against the monotonous dull style of modern housing… It was the artist’s declared goal to erect his house in a somewhat organized growth process that allowed for spontaneous inspiration. The construction workers were encouraged to develop their own creativity during the construction process…

…The first echo to Hundertwasser’s architectural revolution is still uneven… Local ramblers and tourists who are flocking in growing numbers to Vienna’s new construction predominantly to compliment the builder who scurries about with his hammer. Occasionally, a terribly loud clanking mixes with the spontaneous applause when yet another driver distracted by the colorful façades causes a car accident…

Winfried Maass
(Stern No. 32, August 1, 1985)

Conventional Concrete Castle Underneath a Colorful Exterior

…In remote New Zealand… Hundertwasser could hardly fend off the municipal red tape debates in his native Vienna. Result: Shared areas, swimming pool and sauna have been cut; the costly brick construction has been reduced to a minimum. Future tenants have to pay approximately seven Marks per square meter living space. This is not exactly cheap for Viennese public housing conditions, especially since the house is located in a less attractive area that now is being upgraded by the colorful building. However, the project is not a good model for a new, environmental conscious architecture. Hundertwasser’s creed, “I am proud to be a beautifier” is turning against him.

Karlheinz Schmid
(art No. 8/1985)

Neither Quality nor Housing Value

To transform (the Bregenz Festival Hall) would be a ridiculous activity for me. For me Hundertwasser is absolutely beyond question… The Hundertwasser House in Vienna has no quality, neither in housing value nor in its architecture. It was the attempt of an artist to express his illusions and it has failed miserably. Hundertwasser has not taken into consideration the housing needs of people.

Arch. Anton Fink
(WANN UND WO, Bregenz, August 1985)

From the Pattern Book of a Garden Gnome

The construction site of a housing experiment whose interior is slowly moving towards completion has been nature apostle Hundertwasser’s training territory for weeks…

What rather elicits a smile on the exterior and in its craziness is reminiscent of these “naïve” artists who have always built themselves fantasy castles in gardens or other places…anarchic acts of construction…references from the garden gnome’s pattern book… Perhaps one does not have to live in it in the long run, perhaps at one point it will be turned into an Art Museum and document all the grotesquerie abundant in Austria and attract curious visitors from all over the world… Until now, no tenant has been found who wants to surrender his or her life permanently to Hundertwasser… And actually the house must acquire patina (get moldy?). May be in fifty years, as a ruin, it will have garnered the power of attraction.

Kristian Sotriffer
(Presse, August 12, 1985)

Nature Sermon with Concrete

…Discrepancies between the propagated ideal and the concrete reality…this does not even come close to solving the problems of social housing…half horror castle, half gazebo …

Why the floor in the narrow hallways has to be paved in waves, escapes the understanding of the lay person, while the professional can probably provide information more easily as to the deeper life conditions of such coercion into seasickness.

More important than these inconveniences, however, appears the largely two-story arrangement of the apartments recognizable on the exterior by their coloring: Those who climb up and down the wooden staircase of a maisonette apartment feel as though they are in a small private home rather than caught in an apartment silo…

…Instead of serious Postmodernism most playful Post-Historicism…

Ulrich Weinzierl
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 23, 1985)

Translated by Uta Hoffmann

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

on September 30, 1980 in Vienna

Hundertwasser and Mayor Gratz on the occasion of the presentation of the model. Photo: Bernd Lötsch

So it is imperative that we must break with a whole series of regulations. These regulations, laws and ordinances, created at another time, under different conditions, for the benefit and protection of people, are now, in the light of new requirements and restrictions, directed against the environment and man.

Without an environment which is befitting to man and without peace with nature an existence worthy of man is impossible. These peace negotiations with nature must begin soon or it will be too late.

With authoritarian discipline and self-discipline it might work for a while more or less, and it can be put off.

But then the body and soul will rebel, and we don’t know why.

This house is intended as first approach to a conversation with nature, in which we and nature are equal partners; one may not overpower the other.

Thus, in the ecological house, window right and the tree obligation must be restored.

The WINDOW RIGHT means the freedom for the resident to recreate the prefabricated space of the apartment he is to live in.

This is especially true of the outside wall of his flat. “A person must be allowed to lean out of his window and to paint everything in arm’s reach pink, so people can see from far away, from the street, that there lives a MAN.”

He must also be permitted to let creeping plants grow on the outside walls.

Whether the resident makes use of this window right or not is up to him.

It is then not the government’s, the authorities’ fault if the facades remain rigid in lethally sterile uniformity, and they can wash their hands of it.

Man has three skins: his own, his clothing and his dwelling. All three skins must continually change, be renewed, steadily grow and incessantly change or the organism will die.

When the resident moves in, his creative building activity must begin; it must not be finished when he moves in. In addition, there are unnatural laws strictly forbidding any “unauthorised changes” in the prefabricated building. In this way man is cooped up like an imbecilic slave without rights for whom any creative activity and redesign of HIS OWN living space is made impossible.

The person must move into a criminal building which disregards fundamental laws of nature and man, and this person may not change that of his own accord even though he lives there.

If the architectural skin is forbidden to grow like one’s own, this is a dangerous strangling of life. The pent-up, the inhibited energies of life are then let off in other ways: in aggression and depression, in sickness, unhappiness, divorce, suicide, terrorism, vandalism, mental illness.

TREE OBLIGATION means the restoration of the dialogue with nature.

This is about a fundamental turnabout, a fundamental new orientation.

An everyday life without intimate contact with tree, plants, soil and humus is unworthy of man.

Waiting for vacation, parks, walks in the Vienna Woods is almost even less than the daily obligatory march around the prison courtyard by the inmates.

It is not about putting approved plants in even greater numbers in approved vases, buckets and tubs everywhere, like decorative pieces of furniture. Nor is it about putting in even more lawns maintained by the city. It is about helping nature grow wild in the city, too.

As of now a “non-approved” tree may not grow, even if it doesn’t bother anyone and everybody likes it. Only a freely growing is a true partner and gives us more than we imagine.

The difficulty about building a house worthy of man, and for other people, to boot, is familiar to all architects. The standardised, prefabricated building components make quicker, seemingly cheaper construction possible, but they make creative and natural irregularities impossible. A house worthy of man would have to be like an old farmhouse: all the windows of different size, not in one vanishing line and not at one level, but placed at various, harmoniously organic places.

The storeys of differing heights, the lower ones taller, the upper ones lower.

A few balconies of various kinds and sizes, placed ornamentally and organically.

The outer wall is not perfectly straight and flat like hardboard, but natural, almost imperceptibly humpy, built by hand or with interspersed mosaics and ornaments.

The steps of differing height, width and of varying materials.

Boston ivy and other climbers and trees must be part of the plan from the beginning. The trees must be planted even before the cornerstone is laid.

Humus toilets and small-scale sewage-treatment facilities with water plants on the site must supplant water closets. For our water closet produces toxins and epidemics, and the waste of water costs us a lot. For our waste must be brought to central facilities by way of long sewer systems in order to be neutralised by some kind of expensive method.

The presorting and re-use of refuse must be a matter of course and something each individual is glad to do.

Material which can decay becomes humus. Paper, glass, metal, plastic, fabrics, wood and dangerous medicines and chemicals are stored and collected separately. (In the meantime, this prediction has become reality.)

On the house:

As many as possible and even more of these principles of dwelling which are more befitting to man and more responsible should be fulfilled.

1. Children must be allowed to scribble, paint and scratch all public walls, as far as their hands can reach.
   The murals free of charge come to the good of everyone, as this breaks through the cold, heartless anonymity. A wonderful relationship is reached with the house in which the child and his parents live. The house is then not anonymous, inimical block. These walls can be plastered with 1 cm of grey plaster-of-paris for scratching and painting, renewable every year.
2. Grass and trees must be able to grow on all horizontal surfaces under the sky, on the elevator shafts, too; where the snow is in the winter everything must be green in the summer.
   The horizontal belongs to nature.
   The vertical belongs to man.
   From a bird’s-eye view the house is invisible, as everything is green.
3. All green surfaces are accessible, even to tenants beneath a grass roof and those diagonally beneath a grass roof. In this way, the flats and living spaces are doubled in size.
4. A part of the old house façade which is being torn down comprising two superimposed windows with stucco in the old Empire style, must be preserved and incorporated into the new house.
   So the spirits of the old house can move to the new one.
   This is more than a talisman, more than superstition.
   It is a necessity for which there is thorough proof.
   A total, complete destruction of the old walls would amount to disregarding the past, a destruction of the basis, which would bitterly avenge itself.
   For the new house would be doomed to failure, like all the others which were built without heeding this principle.
5. Tree tenants must find quarters in the new house. Tree tenants are trees growing out of windows, thus providing the sterile, vertical house surface with greenery, with foliage, forest.
   Trees on the street are often impossible because of the traffic and the inside, and roof gardens are not visible from the street.
   So the vertical wall is an obvious location for planting trees. The tree tenant requires minimal space and pays the rent with oxygen, beauty, romanticism, with its capacity to absorb and filter dust, as an improver of air quality, provider of shade and in many other long-lasting currencies.
6. The soil on the terraces will be from .5 to 1 cm thick and come up to the height of the window sills, so that the resident will be able to see the grass from a sitting position.
   In this way nature will be brought closer to him.
   He can reach the flowers and grass with his hand from the window.
   A more intimate, healthier life with nature is facilitated, so that the person living beneath the grass roof is not limited in the height of his flat.
   So that more soil can be put on the roofs, so that even larger trees can grow.
   The incidence of light remains the same.
   The apartments are just as dry and airy as others, without grass in the front of the windows; they even have much better air thanks to the additional oxygen.
7. The sidewalk on Löwengasse has an arcade over it, on which greenery and trees will be planted.
   In this way the sidewalk is protected from weather and still has enough light.
   The apartments on the first storey have access to the arcade greenery and thus also have a roof garden in front of their windows.
   The houses across the street have a view of grass and trees instead of a grey sidewalk.
8. The storeys should get lower towards the top. Lower down, higher storeys, larger windows, so that a more democratic distribution of light and air is guaranteed. The modern, equally large storeys infringe upon the equal rights of all to light and air, as it makes the upper tenants more privileged.
   But the lower tenants are disadvantaged. One square metre of window does not let in the same amount of light and air everywhere.
9. The outer and inner walls must not be perfectly straight and flat, straightened by a board, but must be enlivened with the hand. Specialists and bricklayers must be brought in this task, whose honour is challenged to achieve thus enlivened walls.
   Test wall finishing must be begun with at once.
10. I will put irregular ceramic lines on the outer façade so that the geometric rectangular windows, edges and other structural lines lose something of their well-known aggressive terror.
11. The house should be a challenge.
    That despite concrete and modern industrial materials naturally growing trees are possible.
    It should even prove that even modern building methods can enable a piece of nature, of spontaneous vegetation, to be in the downtown area.
12. After the trees are planted on the roof, the terraces and arcade roofs and the tree tenants are installed, one year of time should go by to give the vegetation the chance to find its natural growth. Before the tenants move in and perhaps destroy the young plants.
13. A budget must be created to repair possible damage to the roof gardens, take care of the trees and replace dead trees with new ones.
14. The growth of the trees should proceed as naturally as possible, without man interfering in a gardening capacity, with the aim of letting a piece of truly untouched nature come to be. Not a manicured, clipped, evergreen, affected garden. In this regard, the grass must not be cut, the foliage which falls on the grass not be removed.
15. The window rights of the tenants must be legally guaranteed.
    The window right ceases where it can be to the neighbour’s detriment.

Why are ugliness and inhumane building methods allowed?
Why are there permits for such things?

Everywhere you look dreadfulness is congealed to ugliness. And all these buildings are built by qualified architects.

Why aren’t beauty and building methods befitting to man permitted?
It should be the other way round.

Help me to eliminate anonymous perfectionism so a meaningful new era can begin. The house is a co-opertive effort of an architect and a painter, with all the compromises that entails between rationality and feasible irregular romanticism.

That is exactly what makes it interesting.

This solitary example is a long overdue necessity which provides the answer as to whether current architecture can be and look different. The architect is more responsible for the inside, the painter for the outside.

The painter wants creativity in harmony with the laws of nature.

The architect has to make sure the whole thing doesn’t cave in.

The seemingly additional costs do not exist. For they will pay for themselves in better quality of life, a higher quality of dwelling and happiness. Psychological depression and unhappiness cost a lot more money.

Not to mention the costs the general public has to bear for doctors, hospitals, medicine.

If people can live in an environment compatible with them which they can recreate themselves instead of in an anonymous, hostile, aggressive concrete desert, they won’t want to escape at every opportunity, like from a concentration camp, either to the countryside, on holiday, or into substances which make them forget their hostile environment or drown it out.

And that costs a lot of money, too.

There will be more pleasure in life and in working, less aggression and vandalism. That can be reckoned in money, too.

The grass roofing lessens dust, noise, heating costs, produces oxygen, lessens climate extremes. These are cost savings, too. The bottom line is in any case positive.

The house is not an “eco-house”. For it has no solar-energy installations on the roof, no humus toilets, no wind generators. No cattle are grazing on the roof, but it will be possible to harvest some fruit and vegetables on the roof.

It is an unusual house. For it is meant to be an oasis of humanity and nature in the sea of rational buildings, the realisation of the longing of people for romanticism.

Precisely that romanticism which rational architecture negates and attempts to uproot with lethal, sterile zealotry.

Everyone will be glad to return home. For the house sparkles in the sunshine and in the moonlight. It has fountains, and you can sit amidst the trees. And you look at the living walls and recognise the living windows with pleasure, the ones you can reshape yourself, behind which you are at home.

Hundertwasser, 1980

Hundertwasser’s changes and amendments from 1996 are set in italic.

In 1972, he had his first architectural models made for the Eurovision ‘Wünsch dir was’ show, which he used to visualize his ideas on forested roofs, tree tenants and window rights. In these models he developed new architectural shapes, such as the eye-slit house, the terrace house and the high-rise meadow house.

High-rise-meadow-house, architecture model, 1972

Eye-slit-house, architecture model, 1972

Terrace house, architecture model, 1972

In lectures at academies and before architectural associations, Hundertwasser elucidated his concerns regarding an architecture in harmony with nature and man.

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