Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
most of his family was murdered. Even as a child who drew and painted, he
was piloted in his development by the direction of Egon Schiele's painted
architectural citations; Hundertwasser was attracted to portray buildings and
was a generation ahead of his time as an ecologist. At last, after 30 years of
painting fantasy ideal environments which attracted a huge audience and
which goaded authorities with depicted taunts that a better coexistence
with nature was possible, Hundertwasser was given the chance to build.
While Hundertwasser had been preparing throughout his life to erect the
marvelous structures he imagined in his paintings, finally on August 16,
1983, ground was broken for his apartment block on the corner of Löwen-
gasse and Kegelgasse; the City of Vienna had challenged him to actually
erect one of his buildings instead of merely criticizing the academic and
municipal post-modernists.
Today Hundertwasser's apartment complex, the third-most-visited
attraction in Vienna, is 600 percent oversubscribed. The people who dwell
there log less sick leave than other workers, as Hundertwasser had pre-
dicted.They report that they are happier than other workers.Their children
are more creative. The building cost essentially as much to raise as a tradi-
tional structure. Hundertwasser's building contains the same number of
apartments as prescribed in the original public works program—he was
given no dispensation for “art”—and was constructed with basically the
same budget as the municipality allotted for this project before Hundert-
wasser assumed it; his success drove the professional architects crazy in
anger. He has gone on to erect many other buildings.Yet, for all his ame-
liorating of the urban situation, Hundertwasser does not believe the city
must be abandoned as a concept. Here we face the two extremes, the alpha
and omega of good-willed questioning of urbanism's basic assumptions.
Paolo Soleri, trained as an architect, produces and plans giant sculptural
forms while Hundertwasser, an artist compelled to realize his forms in flat
graphic space—as, initially, no one would entrust him to realize such cre-
ations—produces buildings. In fact, as an example of Hundertwasser's un-
artistic practicality, during 1988-89 he reworked the exterior of one of
ecology's real villains, a building all modern planners love to loathe: an
urban incinerator. (In Vienna, Hundertwasser retrofitted the modern Great
Satan of urbanism on strangely Romantic, aesthetic, and oddly pragmatic
terms: the city must still have incinerators; this was the most advanced and
least polluting model; it had to be near the city to reduce the trash's travel,
consequently it is visible from the city center; therefore Hundertwasser
