Sharing Hundertwasser’s legacy | Architecture Now

Hundertwasser’s residence within the Kaurinui Valley, positioned simply 20 minutes north of Kawakawa and fewer than a three-hour drive from Auckland, is to be the one one among his houses all over the world that’s open to the general public. I used to be given a tour by volunteers from Dwelling Hundertwasser, together with Richard Sensible, who labored carefully with Hundertwasser for eight years and now represents the non-profit Hundertwasser Basis in New Zealand.

Born Friedrich Stowasser in Austria in 1928, Hundertwasser was a world-famous painter and architect, famend for his radical views and eccentric strategy to design. His childhood, marked by the devastations of World Conflict II, led him to search out solace in portray various worlds crammed with nature, vibrant colors and summary varieties that might later affect the trajectory of his environmentalism and structure.1

In 1976, he settled in New Zealand, buying a dairy farm within the Kaurinui Valley with the intention of setting nature free.2 He did simply that: over twenty years planting 150,000 timber and widening the Kaurinui Stream that flows via the farm. His philosophy is embodied in each facet of the property and, regardless of current health-and-safety upgrades, Hundertwasser’s dwellings stay as he left them, all the way down to his final procuring checklist and paintbrushes left on the desk.

The tour begins on the Eyeslit, a Hundertwasser design constructed after his dying, changing the outdated decaying farmhouse. Aligned together with his distinctive fashion, it options vibrant pink partitions, vibrant mosaics and columns paying homage to his iconic Kawakawa bathrooms. The Eyeslit serves as a communal area for a pre-tour introduction to Hundertwasser and his legacy that lives on in Kaurinui.

The tour continues via 4 of his six idiosyncratic dwellings scattered all through the property, every reflecting his ecological philosophies. The following cease is The Boatshed, a gabled timber constructing, residence to his boat, La Giudecca. Throughout a bridge over the Kaurinui Stream is The Cave, an area dug into the hillside, containing a bench and a whole lot of wētā. Returning over the stream, we arrive at The Pigsty, Hundertwasser’s major dwelling, which, true to its identify, is a former pigsty transformed right into a liveable area. Inside, a hallway stretches the size of the house, with the kitchen, eating and front room, and a mixed bed room and loo branching off. It’s constructed from recycled glass bottles and pure supplies, resembling earth bricks and logs laid on their sides, extending from inside to exterior, mortared in place with a lime, cement and sawdust combination. With its spontaneously vegetated inexperienced roof, felled tree trunk columns and uneven inside flooring, the dwelling echoes his philosophy that buildings, like human pores and skin, ought to develop and wrinkle over time, evolving alongside nature.3

The Bottlehaus, initially the farm’s milking shed, is Hundertwasser’s different important residence. The inside is crammed with pure gentle from the polycarbonate skylight and bottle partitions, offering good situations for portray. Not but included within the tour due to their distance are the Railway Hut and Mountain Hut. Sensible recounts how he and his kids would hike as much as the Mountain Hut, spending the evening within the residence, constructed three-quarters underground. The partitions and ground are clay earth and the roof, coated in wild greenery, sits simply above the bottom’s floor.

Hundertwasser’s alignment with Māori tradition is mirrored all through his houses; adorning the partitions are timber-carved tiki and the koru flag he designed for New Zealand, symbolising a unified nationwide identification. Hundertwasser was inherently nomadic, transferring between buildings based mostly on their varied features, inadvertently resembling the organisation of customary Māori papakāinga settlements, the place buildings serve distinct functions. Māori would transfer between kāinga seasonally, leaving buildings constructed from pure supplies to decay and return to the earth. On the tour’s remaining cease, the Exhibition Constructing, a letter from Hundertwasser’s good friend A. D. Fagan in 1974 describes him as a guardian of the land, a sentiment akin to Māori identification as kaitiaki – guardians of the whenua. Earlier than his dying, Hundertwasser expressed his want for Māori artists to have equal alternatives in New Zealand. This want was realised within the Whangārei Hundertwasser Artwork Centre and Wairau Māori Artwork Gallery, accomplished in 2022.4

All through the property, Hundertwasser’s interventions – from a waterwheel and out of doors tub to timber plank bridges and ladders feeding into ponds – converse to a way of life that reinforces his dedication to dwelling in concord with nature. In distinction to his daring European structure, Hundertwasser’s New Zealand house is extra subdued and natural, mixing seamlessly into the forest, indistinguishable from the pure surroundings. As Dwelling Hundertwasser volunteer Clive Jackson explains, “He needed to let the colors of nature converse.” He allowed nature to exist in its most wild and pure state, supporting his 1983 Peace Treaty with Nature, the place he asserted that humanity should put itself behind ecological boundaries so the earth can regenerate.5 For example, he thought-about timber to be fellow ‘tenants’ on the property, who ‘paid lease’ via their provision of oxygen, magnificence and pleasure.6

Hundertwasser died in 2000 and, at his personal request, was buried beneath a tulip tree at Kaurinui, his physique returning to the earth to nourish the ‘tree tenant’. This remaining act encapsulates his lifelong philosophy of humanity in concord with nature and, as such, he lives on via the property.

Hundertwasser famously acknowledged, “We’re solely friends of nature and should behave accordingly. Man is essentially the most harmful pest ever to devastate the earth.”7 In a world the place trendy structure is disrupting the pure surroundings and local weather, Kaurinui provides a blueprint for a return to ‘authentic nature’ – a extra sustainable, symbiotic relationship with the earth, and one which resonates with our nation’s indigenous identification and the position we should assume as kaitiaki, guardians, of the pure world.

REFERENCES

1 Nir Barak, 2022, ‘Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000)’, The Architectural Overview, 18 October 2022.

2 Andreas J. Hirsch, 2022, ‘Hundertwasser’s “5 Skins” Unfold’, in Hundertwasser in New Zealand: The Artwork of Creating Paradise. Auckland: Oratia Books, p. 72.

3 Wieland Schmied, 2007, For a Extra Human Structure in Concord with Nature: Hundertwasser Structure. Köln: Taschen, p. 259.

4 Cooperation Settlement 2016, p. 24.

5 Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1983, Peace Treaty with Nature, Hundertwasser Basis. hundertwasser.com/en/texts/friedensvertrag_mit_der_natur

6 Wieland Schmied, 2007, For a Extra Human Structure in Concord with Nature: Hundertwasser Structure, p. 86.

7 Hundertwasser Basis. 2016. Hundertwasser Architektur & Philosophie. Germany: Wörner Verlag GmbH, p. 30.