Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Hundertwasser in New Zealand in 1998
Born	Friedrich Stowasser
Nationality	Austrian
Known for	Art, architecture

Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser, (December 15, 1928 – February 19, 2000) was an Austrian painter and architect. Born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna, he became one of the best-known contemporary Austrian artists, although controversial, by the end of the 20th century.

Childhood and personal life

Hundertwasser's father Ernst Stowasser died three months after his son's first birthday. The Second World War was a hard time for Hundertwasser and his mother Elsa, as she was Jewish. They avoided persecution by posing as Catholics, a credible ruse because Hundertwasser's father had been a Catholic. To remain inconspicuous, Hundertwasser joined the Hitler Youth.

After the war, he spent three months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. At this time he began to sign his art as Hundert instead of Stowasser. He left to travel, using a small set of paints he carried at all times to sketch anything that caught his eye. He had his first commercial painting success in 1952-3 with an exhibition in Vienna. It wasn't until 1981 that he designed his first building.

Hundertwasser married Herta Leitner in 1958 but they divorced two years later. He married again in 1962 but was divorced by 1966.

Characteristics of Hundertwasser

Typical Hundertwasser facade in Plochingen

Hundertwasser's original and unruly artistic vision expressed itself in pictorial art, environmentalism, philosophy, and design of facades, postage stamps, flags, and clothing (among other areas). The common themes in his work utilised bright colours, organic forms, a reconciliation of humans with nature, and a strong individualism, rejecting straight lines.

His art life began when he was at Vienna, he became fascinated with the work of Egon Schiele and so unknowingly his art life began.

He remains sui generis, although his architectural work is comparable to Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) in its biomorphic forms and use of tile. He was also inspired by the Austrian of the Vienna Art Nouveau (Vienna Secession) movement's traditions, and by the Austrian painters Egon Schiele (1890–1918) and Gustav Klimt (1862-1918).

He was fascinated with spirals, and called straight lines "the devil's tools". He called his theory of art "transautomatism", based on Surrealist automatism, but focusing on the experience of the viewer, rather than the artist.

Architecture

File:Vena 19.jpg

Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna

Although Hundertwasser first achieved notoriety for his boldly-coloured paintings, he is more widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design. The Hundertwasserhaus block in Vienna features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

As of the early 1950s he had increasingly focused on architecture. He began this undertaking with manifestos, essays and demonstrations, e.g., by reading out his "Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture" in 1958 on the occasion of an art and architectural event held at the Seckau Monastery, and then in Munich in 1967 with his "Speech in Nude for the Right to a Third Skin", and in Vienna in 1968 as well as his lecture "Loose from Loos, A Law Permitting Individual Buildings Alterations or Architecture-Boycott Manifesto", which he held at the Concordia Press Club in Vienna in 1968.

In the Mouldiness Manifesto he claimed for the first time the "Window Right": "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." In his nude speeches of 1967 and 1968 Hundertwasser condemned the enslavement of humans by the sterile grid system of conventional architecture and by the series production of mechanised industries. He expressed his rejection of rationalism, of the straight line and of functional architecture.

For Hundertwasser it is the rational, sterile architecture, built following the tradition of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos ("Ornament and Crime") in its deadly monotony, which is responsible for human misery. He calls for a boycott of this type of architecture, demands creative freedom of building, as well as the right to individualisation of structures.

In the 1970s, Hundertwasser had his first architectural models built, such as the models for the Eurovision TV-show "Wünsch Dir was" (Make a Wish) in 1972, which he used to visualize his ideas on forested roofs, tree tenants and the window right. In these models he developed new architectural shapes, such as the spiral house, the eye-slit house, the terrace house and the high-rise meadow house. In 1974, they were then joined by models, made by Peter Manhardt for him, of the pit house, the grass roof house and the green service station – along with his idea of the Green Motorway – the invisible, the inaudible.

In the early 1980s Hundertwasser had the opportunity to act as an "architecture doctor" as he called himself and he redesigned the Rosenthal Factory in Selb and the Mierka Grain Silo in Krems, Lower Austria.

In the architectural projects that followed (housing complexes in Germany, a church in Bärnbach, Austria, a district heating plant in Vienna, incineration plant and sludge centre in Osaka, Japan, railway station in Uelzen, a winery in Napa Valley, a public toilet in Kawakawa he implemented window right and tree tenants, uneven floors, woods on the roof, and spontaneous vegetation. In his architectural oeuvre, Hundertwasser puts diversity before monotony, replaces a grid system with an organic approach that enables unregulated irregularities.

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Incinerator works in Vienna

In 1972 he published the manifesto Your window right — your tree duty. Planting trees in an urban environment was to become obligatory: "If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest."

Personal details and legacy

Hundertwasser (left) 1965 in Hannover

His adopted surname is based on the translation of Sto (the Slavic word for "one hundred") into German. The name Friedensreich has a double meaning as "Peaceland" or "Peacerich" (in the sense of "peaceful"). The other names he chose for himself, Regentag and Dunkelbunt, translate to "Rainy day" and "Darkly multicoloured". His name Friedensreich Hundertwasser means, "Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water".

Hundertwasser considered New Zealand as his official home, and no matter where he went in the world, his watch was always set to New Zealand time. That finally became the place he was buried after his death at sea on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 in 2000, at the age of 71.

Hundertwasser also worked in the field of applied art. He created flags, stamps, coins, posters. His most famous flag is the Koru Flag; he has also designed stamps for the Cape Verde islands and for the United Nations post administration in Geneva on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He also designed apartment buildings and a public toilet in Kawakawa in his adopted home of New Zealand.

In 1999 he started his last project named Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg. Although he never finished this work completely, the building was put up a few years later in Magdeburg, a town in central Germany, and finally opened on October 3, 2005.

An art gallery featuring his work will be established in a council building in Whangarei, New Zealand, and will bring to fruition his 1993 plans for improving the building. He believed that architects should be inspired by, or include nature in their work.

In New Zealand his design beliefs have been adopted by a New Zealand terracotta tile manufacturer, who promote his style as "Organic Tiling". The tiling is designed by Chris Southern (the tiler that worked with Friedensreich Hundertwasser on the Kawakawa toilets).

Buildings

• Hundertwasser House, Vienna, Austria
• District Heating Plant Spittelau, Vienna, Austria
• Hundertwasserhaus Waldspirale, Darmstadt, Germany
• KunstHausWien, Vienna, Austria
• Kindergarten Heddernheim, Frankfurt
• Motorway Restaurant, Bad Fischau-Brunn, Austria
• Hot Springs Village, Bad Blumau, Styria, Austria
• Hundertwasserkirche, Baernbach, Styria, Austria
• Markthalle, Altenrhein, Switzerland
• Wohnen unterm Regenturm, Plochingen, Germany
• Quixote Winery, Napa Valley, (USA), 1988-1998 (his only building in the US)
• Maishima Incineration Plant, Osaka (Japan), 1997-2000
• Public toilets, Kawakawa (New Zealand), 1999
• Hundertwasser "environmental railway station", Uelzen (Germany), 1999-2001
• Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany, 2003-2005
• Ronald McDonald Kinder Vallei, Valkenburg, The Netherlands

Selected works

• Kunsthaus in Vienna
  Kunsthaus in Vienna
• 
  Grüne Zitadelle in Magdeburg, Germany
• 
  Quixote Winery in Napa Valley
• 
  Hundertwasser facade in Plochingen
• 
  House in Waldspirale
• 
  Thermal power plant in Vienna
• 
  Residential building at Bad Soden am Taunus (suburban Frankfurt, Germany)

Hot springs, Bad Blumau (Austria)

References and sources

Notes

Sources

• Hundertwasser (Interview by Harry Rand) ISBN 3-8228-3416-9

External links

• The Mosaics of Hundertwasser
• Hundertwasserhaus website
• "Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg" - The last project of Hundertwasser

See also: Stowasser