In 1959, an associate professor at the Hamburg University of the Arts begins a lesson in the classroom by choosing a point somewhere on the wall and from this point unrolls one infinite line, drawing it along the floor, windows and doors of the auditorium. For two days and two nights, Fredensreich Hundertwasser, his friends and his students without stopping, replacing each other, for two days and two nights draw this spiral, despite persistent demands of the school administration to stop the "hooliganism" that disrupts the educational process.
performance Friedensreich Hundertwasser at the University of the Arts in Hamburg, 1959.
The manual not only calls the performance "an open mockery of art", but also turns off the light in the audience and, as a result, forcibly stops the artists. The line is interrupted at a height of 2,5 meters. Hundertwasser resigns from the school in protest. After all, there is no art where there is no freedom.
Hundertwasser professes this freedom throughout his life. It can be assumed that the famous "naked manifesto" about the right to a "third skin" was presented by him in a naked form in order to emphasize this very inner freedom of self-expression. And the effect of the exploding bomb is a consequence of the conservative public's reaction to yet another scandal. What was Hundertwasser talking about? About "sick" cities and "infected" houses, on the toxicity of a standardized urban environment.
"You have the right to transform your window and the wall around it as far as your hand can reach and as long as your home suits you"
He boldly and clearly stated that he considers only Gauda's creations to be healthy. Well, unless there are still backwoods areas with the walls of slums painted with graffiti, and the homes of primitive peoples. According to Friedensreich, every person has the right to change his "third skin" - to paint the outer walls of his apartment in his favorite color, and to make the windows as he likes - large or small, mirrored or transparent, multi-colored, stained glass... In other words, half a century back he loudly declared: "celebrate diversity"!
The facade of the Hundertwasser House in Vienna (co-authored with Josef Kravina), 1986.
The second genius that Hundertwasser admired was the Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele. His "patchwork" and ability to express sharp, dramatic beauty, his "quick" view of the world and a special color palette influenced Friedensreich's creative style in terms of graphic works, and a little later, when at the age of 45, Hundertwasser became interested in architecture - on his architecture:
Egon Schiele, "Houses with colorful linen". 1914. Oil on canvas
"It's all about the walls. The walls of towns and houses. This made a huge impression on me. They glowed in the dark. For me, at home, Shile were living beings. For the first time, I felt that the outer walls were like skin. He wrote them as if there was no difference between the skin of a naked girl and the skin at home. This third skin showed something that screamed and lived, it was amazing. Looking at these houses, you feel that they are alive."
"Man and nature must live in harmony"
Hundertwasser also makes his houses come alive. Houses without straight lines, in which the architecture is subordinate to the natural landscape, houses with roofs covered with grass and interiors in which the main "tenants" are trees, houses similar to wooded hills and green pastures. Houses in which there are no level floors, but there are dunes and dunes. "Man and nature must live in harmony," said Hundertvasser, offering a completely puzzling geometry in its unevenly painted and plastered living spaces, designed to tear the inhabitant out of grayness and mundanity and wean society away from linear thinking. Thus, in the famous "Forest Spiral" in Darmstadt, there is not a single right angle, and of the thousand windows on the facade of the residential complex, not one repeats the other.
Residential building "Forest Spiral", Darmstadt, 1998-2000.
Did Hundertwasser discover a new style in architecture? Yes. Has it become mass? Definitely not, despite the pilgrimage of tourists to the architect's objects, such as, for example, to his dizzying house in the Austrian capital, which is illuminated by flashes of cameras day and night.
The hot spring village of Blumau in Styria
When the mayor of Vienna, Leopold Gratz, was asked how he could even allow Hundertwasser to build his experimental brainchild in the center of Vienna, he thought and answered: "I just wanted to prevent the appearance of something ugly in this place."
Another Vienna attraction is the incinerator with a painted facade and a pipe crowned with a golden layer, the most famous in Europe, 1987.
