Hundertwasserhaus

Landmark · Landstraße (3rd)Vienna,Austria

Vienna council flats a painter built without a single straight line, floors undulating, no two windows alike, 250 trees planted into the structure.

The Hundertwasserhaus is social housing owned by the city of Vienna, and no line on it is straight. The floors undulate, the facade is broken into blocks of clashing colour, and no two windows are identical. Gold onion domes sit on the roofline and ceramic columns hold up the entrance. Some 250 trees and shrubs are planted into the structure, so branches come out of walls and the roof terraces are wooded. The painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed it and it was finished in 1985. He held that the straight line was godless and that a tenant should be able to lean out of a window and paint the wall around it. People live in the building, which is the part visitors forget. There is no lobby to enter and no floor to tour, so you look from the pavement, and residents put up with a permanent audience at their front door. Across the street a former tyre workshop was converted by the same artist into an arcade with a floor that pitches like a deck.

Worth knowing

Good to know

This is somebody's home — there is no public interior, the residents did not choose an audience, and the doorways are doorways rather than exhibits.
Stand back at the corner — from the junction of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse the whole facade fits in one frame; from directly underneath it reads as a wall of paint.
Count the windows, not the colours — no two are the same, because the argument was that a resident should be identifiable from outside.
Early or late — it is one small corner and the tour buses reach it by mid-morning, after which the pavement opposite is solid people.

Things to do

1
Find the corner where it all fits
Walk past the building first, then come back and stand at the street corner diagonally opposite. From there the coloured blocks, the gold domes, the ceramic columns and the trees on the roof line up into one composition, which is impossible from directly across the road.
2
Walk on the sloping floor opposite
The converted workshop across the street has a floor that rises and falls under your feet as you cross it. It takes about four steps to notice and it is genuinely disorienting, which is the most direct experience available of what the man was arguing for.