Hundertwasserhaus
— — a house that refused the straight line.
Not only on a wall.
“An apartment building on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse, finished in 1985 to designs by the painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser with the architect Joseph Krawina. No two windows match. Trees grow from inside the rooms and lean out over the street. The floors of the public passageways are deliberately uneven, because Hundertwasser believed the straight line was godless.
Hundertwasserhaus, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Hundertwasserhaus stands at Kegelgasse 36 to 38 in Vienna's third district, Landstraße, about fifteen minutes on foot from St Stephen's cathedral. The City of Vienna commissioned it as social housing in 1977 and Hundertwasser worked unpaid, saying he wanted to prevent something ugly from being built on the site. Joseph Krawina drew the construction plans. The building holds fifty-two apartments, four offices, sixteen private terraces, and three communal terraces, and opened to its first tenants in February 1986.
Patches of ochre, oxblood, lapis, white, and forest green run across the façade in irregular blocks, separated by thick black borders. The roof is planted with grass and small trees, and the floor of the inner courtyard rolls like a hillside. About two hundred and fifty trees and shrubs are planted into the structure itself, some growing inside apartments and reaching out through the windows. Hundertwasser called them the building's tenants too, with their own right to light and air.
The Hundertwasserhaus is private housing and not open to the public, but the façade can be seen freely from Kegelgasse and Löwengasse, and the small Kalke Village shopping arcade across the street belongs to the same project. The nearest U-Bahn stop is Landstraße, about ten minutes' walk through the third district. Tour buses arrive throughout the day; the quieter hours are early morning and the hour after sunset, when the irregular windows catch the streetlamps.