Hundertwasserhaus

Interesting facts

Hundertwasser took no fee for designing the house, saying it was worth it simply to prevent something ugly from being built in its place.

Some 900 tonnes of soil cover the roof terraces, which together measure around 920 square metres.

Hundertwasser first showed his ideas of forested roofs, "tree tenants" and every tenant's "window right" in architectural models made for a 1972 TV show, Wünsch Dir was.

The architect's first drafts of 1979 followed the standard rules for social housing, and Hundertwasser rejected them as exactly the rigid grid he had always fought against.

Hundertwasser later asked the city to replace the original architect, and Peter Pelikan, a municipal employee, took over the planning and became his long-term partner.

Among the models Hundertwasser drew on were Antoni Gaudí, the postman Ferdinand Cheval's hand-built Palais Idéal and the Watts Towers of Los Angeles.

Construction ran from 16 August 1983 to 15 October 1985 and cost the equivalent of about 6 million euros; the city of Vienna still owns the building.

The flats range from about 30 to 150 square metres, and residents share two children's playrooms and a winter garden.

In a 2003 case over photographs of the house, Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that German freedom-of-panorama rules apply even to pictures taken in Austria.

Hundertwasser went on to shape around 40 buildings worldwide, from Darmstadt's Waldspirale to the spa village of Bad Blumau and buildings in Osaka and New Zealand.

Why it is worth it

In a street of sober Viennese apartment blocks, one building refuses every straight line. The Hundertwasserhaus in the Landstraße district is patched in red, yellow, blue and white, its windows are all different, its floors undulate, and trees and shrubs, around 250 of them, grow from its terraces and roof, some rooted inside the flats with branches reaching out of the windows. It stands on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse, and it is ordinary municipal housing: people live here as tenants of the city.

The house was built between 1983 and 1985 to the vision of the painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who rejected the levelling grid of modern architecture and wanted instead a house for people and trees. The idea of letting him build one went back to 1977, when Chancellor Bruno Kreisky wrote to Vienna's mayor Leopold Gratz suggesting that Hundertwasser be given a housing project to try out his ideas. The architect Joseph Krawina worked out the design with him, and Peter Pelikan acted as planning architect. The result, opened in 1986, contains around fifty apartments plus offices and shops, with sixteen private terraces and three shared ones, and is home to about 150 people. The uneven floors were deliberate: Hundertwasser held that an uneven floor is a melody for the feet. Authorship of the house became a legal question decades later; in 2010 Austria's Supreme Court confirmed that Krawina was its co-creator alongside Hundertwasser.

Landstraße, the 3rd district of Vienna, lies just east of the old city centre, between the Ring and the Danube Canal. Vienna, Austria's capital and the seat of the Habsburg court for centuries, is known above all for its imperial palaces, its baroque churches and its musical life, which makes this deliberately crooked house, a few minutes from the Ringstrasse, all the more conspicuous.

Getting there

The Hundertwasserhaus is in Vienna's 3rd district, Landstraße, less than 1 km from the district centre and about 1.5 km east of St. Stephen's Cathedral. The KunstHausWien, a museum devoted to Hundertwasser's work, is about 400 m away. The nearest airport is Vienna International Airport (VIE), about 17 km away.

Hundertwasserhaus

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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