Designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Vienna’s most fanciful social housing project combines contempt for strait-jacketed Modernism with nostalgia for an imaginary past.
Each elevation gives the impression that several buildings have compacted horizontally into each other. (photo: Ifotokon–stock.adobe.com)
Architecture, as a field, does not make fertile ground for freaks. The basement tinkerer; the garage inventor; the online crank: imaginative oddballs generally hew to less costly, more congenial enthusiasms, ones less guarded by the flaming swords of bureaucracy and professionalism. The occasional kook may slip past – backyard genius Simon Rodia, building his towers of junk in LA; Marino Auriti, mocking up his Palace of Knowledge in a Pennsylvania auto shop – but in the main, those that do, usually receive a warmer reception in the art world than among their putative designer colleagues. Most simply stay out.
Not Friedrich Stowasser – or, as he was known in his (sort of) professional life, Friedensreich (‘peace-realm’) Regentag (‘rainy-day) Dunkelbunt (‘dark-brindled’) Hundertwasser (‘hundred-waters’). An artist by vocation, the eccentric Austrian was determined to pursue architecture not as mere avocation but as a parallel career, driven by an urgent need to change the physical world. Born in Vienna in 1928, resident at one time or another in New Zealand, northern France, and Uganda, Hundertwasser was a hippie avant la lettre, an antiauthoritarian monarchist, and one of the more thoroughgoing nutjobs to ever create real, habitable buildings. His most celebrated work, the Hundertwasserhaus apartment building in his hometown, shows all of his delightfully haywire impulses firing at once.
A madcap mash-up of styles gives the building a Disneyesque quality: a jester in the middle of the august imperial city. (photo: Belyaa–stock.adobe.com)
Though not his first commission in the country of his birth, Hundertwasser’s 1985 breakthrough project was his first in the capital and among his first to be realised, a triumphant homecoming for the peripatetic seeker who had wandered around and through graphic design, painting, and sculpture during his lengthy sojourns abroad. Architecture had long been his destination: for the previous three decades, Hundertwasser had been expounding various theories and manifesti on the art of building, with the accent on the art. A 1972 documentary feature finds the architecte manqué living in West Germany, attempting to convert an old boat into a floating house; referring to his hallucinatory, primitivist landscape paintings, the artist (appearing, at intervals, in the nude) says that they represent “how I think architecture should be,” just as the boat represented his ideal of a home untethered to Heimat. Anything that smacked of stasis, of straight lines, of boredom: Hundertwasser was against it.
The house that bears his name shows exactly what he had in mind. Occupying the northwestern corner of a standard city block in the Landstrasse district, the building has two separate façades that differ not only from each other but within each elevation, making it appear like several buildings compacted horizontally into each other. In a sense, this is what it is: though the apartments occupy something like standard floors, the ground level and rooftop sections bear out the promise of the exterior, a maze of staircases and passages connecting terraces and gardens with uneven pavers, vaulted canopies, and plant life. The diverse material treatments, ranging from stucco to bricks to found shards of terracotta, complete the effect, turning the complex into a madcap mashup of styles and structures, a jester in the middle of the august imperial city.
Beneath that motley exterior, however, the building conceals some rather serious intentions. For one thing, there’s its actual function: Hundertwasserhaus is part of Vienna’s justly-celebrated social housing system, created as a joint endeavor between the city government and private builders with the aim of providing low-cost apartments to working residents. While the program has always invited architectural diversity, Hundertwasser’s contribution seems a special riposte to the Großfeldsiedlung model, the big, towerfilled estates that conform most closely to the stereotype of postwar public housing. At the same time, the architect is lodging a more specific gripe at the patron saint of Viennese architecture – Adolf Loos, whose rationalist masterworks helped give rise to the kind of prim, straightjacketed Modernism that Hundertwasser was so eager to escape (one of his more sweeping broadsides was playfully titled ‘Los von Loos,’ or ‘Free from Loos’).
And then there is the curious issue of Hundertwasser’s politics, which tended to follow the same meandering logic as his buildings. Half-Jewish by birth, young master Stowasser only narrowly escaped the Nazi slaughter; like others of his compatriots, he subsequently developed a nostalgic yearning for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, a conservative but basically non-totalitarian superstate that offered an image of order and grandeur that transcended national and ethnic boundaries. Hundertwasserhaus is a sort of ersatz vision of the old, fusty, mixed-up Kaiserlich und Königlich regime, a combination of incongruous parts coming together in screwy, cacophonous harmony.
The building is also, unfortunately, a bit of a tourist trap. As the University of Birmingham’s Peter Kraftl has observed, out-of-towners “flock there in the thousands…gazing up at the bulbous, multi-colored walls… pressing their noses against the windows.” The everyday residents of the building simply have to put up with this low-level harassment – but poor Hundertwasser, who died in 2000, cannot stand in defence of his architectural reputation, now most associated with a building that has become a Disneyesque photo op. Granted, the building is rather Disneyesque, and its creator’s resolute weirdness makes it only too easy to dismiss him as a marginal figure. Yet even with his late start in his mid-50s, Hundertwasser managed to complete more than 30 projects before his death, an impressive lineup longer than many ‘real’ designers whose influence is far more pervasive. At the very least, the architect deserves to be celebrated as just that, a maker of buildings that went their own, wild way against the grain.
