Hundertwasserhaus, Kegelgasse 36-38, 1030 Vienna, Austria

Illustration by Andrew Cadey

The Hundertwasserhaus is an attention-grabbing block of public housing in Vienna’s District 3.

The designer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000), belonged to the generation that was disillusioned by modernist architecture and its predictably clean, standardised, sleek shapes (“the straight line is godless,” he said). The Hundertwasser House is none of those things, it is an apartment building according to his ideas for a more human architecture in harmony with nature.

This idiosyncratic building with 52 residential apartments, in brick construction, consists of irregular shapes, harsh but now slightly faded colours, undulating floors, and overblown decorations.  The undulating floor in the public areas of the buildings amounts to a rediscovery of human dignity, which was taken away from people in an urban development of flat surfaces.

Limited first edition print run of 20