Hundertwasser

Vivid color, organic forms, and a loathing of straight lines were just a few stalwart characteristics in the unique practice of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000). A non-conformist hero, the artist, architect, and activist left a blazing trail of imagination and ideas in buildings, paintings, manifestos, actions, and more. Hundertwasser’s best-known work is considered the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, a structural synthesis of the vitality and uniqueness that determined the artist’s entire oeuvre. For Hundertwasser, human misery was a result of rational, sterile, monotonous building. He called for a boycott of the modernist paradigm championed by the likes of Adolf Loos, and campaigned instead for an architecture of creative freedom and ecological commitment. A fierce opponent of straight lines, which he called “godless and immoral,” Hundertwasser was fascinated by the spiral, drawing also on the Secessionist forms of Klimt and Schiele.