A municipal housing block with no straight lines, uneven floors and trees growing out of the windows — and people still live in it.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser was a painter with strong views about architecture, chiefly that the straight line is godless and that a tenant should have the right to lean out of a window and paint the wall around it whatever colour they like. Vienna’s city council gave him a social housing commission, and between 1983 and 1985 this was built to his design, with the architect Joseph Krawina and later Peter Pelikan doing the work of making it stand up.
It has fifty-two flats. The floors undulate. The windows are all different. Ceramic columns interrupt the façade in irregular colours, the roofline is planted, and around 250 trees and shrubs grow on the terraces and out of the walls — Hundertwasser’s “tree tenants”, which he argued paid rent in oxygen.
Seeing it
It is a residential building and you cannot go in. The residents have lived with a permanent crowd outside their front door for forty years and there are signs asking for quiet. Photograph it from the pavement and move on.
Across the road is the Hundertwasser Village, a former tyre shop converted by him into a small arcade of souvenir shops with a bar and famously eccentric toilets. It is unashamedly commercial and takes ten minutes.
Kunst Haus Wien
Two streets away on Untere Weißgerberstraße, this is a converted Thonet furniture factory that Hundertwasser remodelled in 1991, and it is the better visit. It holds a permanent museum of his own work — paintings, graphics, architectural models and his ecological writing — and runs temporary photography exhibitions. The floors slope here too, and you can actually walk on them.
What to make of him
Opinion in Vienna is divided and always has been. To admirers he was an early and serious environmentalist who insisted buildings should be habitable rather than rational. To critics he was a decorator whose ideas produced expensive maintenance problems and whose objection to the straight line did not extend to the structural engineering, which someone else had to do.
Both readings survive contact with the building. Go, look, and pick one.
Nearby
The Spittelau incinerator, a district-heating plant on the Danube Canal that Hundertwasser was asked to redesign in 1988, is visible from the U4 and U6 and is arguably his best building — a working waste plant with a gold onion dome. It is not open but it is worth looking out of the train window for.
More Culture & Music
The Secession Building
A white cube with a gilded dome of laurel leaves, built in 1898 as a manifesto, holding Klimt's Beethoven Frieze in the basement.
The Spanish Riding School
Four and a half centuries of classical dressage, performed by Lipizzaner stallions in a white Baroque hall.
The Musikverein
The Golden Hall, where the New Year's Concert is broadcast from, and an acoustic that was arrived at largely by accident.