Hundertwasserhaus exterior walls
Some of the exterior walls of the Hundertwasserhaus, designed in the early 1980s under the direction of Austria's iconic architectural tourist brand person, Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
🧞🦚🐞The Hundertwasserhaus is like a mini utopia of playfulness, colour, subversion of function, lack of symmetry or pattern, and a celebration of ornament, freedom and "luxurious growth". A post-modern repsonse to the legacy of another iconic Viennese architect, the arch-modernist Adolf Loos, who had declared "ornament is a crime" just over 70 years prior.
📖Hundertwasser, who was primarily a visual artist, wrote a beautiful manifesto in the late 50s, "Mould manifesto against rationalism in architecture", which I recommend you look up and read (it's no more than 2 pages). In it, he argues modern architecture is oppressive and people should take charge of their building and inhabitation:
‼️"The tangible and material uninhabitability of slums is preferable to the moral uninhabitability of modern functional architecture. In the so called slums only the human body can be oppressed, but in our modern architecture man's soul is oppressed"
➕⚡"The apartment house tenant must have the freedom to reach from his window as far as his arms can stretch to scrape off the mortar or deface the gridwork of his building. He must be allowed to paint as far as his arms can reach - everything pink, for instance"
