Friedensreich Hundertwasser - inspiration of the month.

“Life is moving into the house, and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn.”

– Hundertwasser

Inspiration of the month, this is where we talk about artists, designers and creatives who we find inspirational.

We couldn’t do an inspiration of the month blog without mentioning one of our first ever loves.

I first learnt about Hundertwasser back at school and throughout the rest of my studies; he has always been an inspiration and his work constantly exciting, always brightening up you day.

To say Hundertwasser was an eccentric would be putting it lightly. Hundertwasser had always had an eye for colour with his school reports even referring to his unusual sense of colour and form. He grew up in the era of angular cleanliness, Bauhaus. A lot of his work has influences from nature and this is part of the reasoning for him never using straight lines.

Instead Hundertwasser like to allow his work to evolve organically. Hundertwasser said that straight lines make people sick because they do not occur in nature.

Spirals became a primary shape in his paintings as he believed they were the only form ‘worthy of confidence- the one that corresponds to the motion which is made when opposites begin to move.’

Hundertwasser was ahead of his time and maybe even ours with his policies still being avant-garde today. He advocated for the incorporation of trees and living plants into the buildings themselves. He believed that their growth should ‘proceed as naturally as possible’. As he rejected the straight line entirely, he started to describe his vision for a style of architecture where people would be glad when a wall starts to get mouldy. Hundertwasser talks about this in his Mouldiness Manifesto and says that “… together with the microbes and fungi, life is moving into the house, and through this process we can more consciously become witnesses of architectural changes from which we have much to learn.”

Although I still do not see us intentionally wanting our walls to turn mouldy there are definitely aspects of his philosophy that are insightful, especially as climate change shifts and replaces the world around us.