About this title: This catalogue raisonne of Hundertwasser's architecture examines all his buildings and projects, whether realized or not, tracing them from the first sketches through the models to completion. It includes commentaries on all the paintings, models and buildings by Hundertwasser himself.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Taschen America Llc
Date Published: 1997
ISBN-13:9783822885642ISBN:3822885649
Description: As New. 12 ¾" x 9 ¾", 317 pp, copy is in NEW condition, includes MINT book wrapper (book was not issued with a traditional dust jacket), includes many colorplates covering Hundertwasser's architecture projects, scarce in this condition. read more
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"Hundertwasser was far better known as an abstract painter somewhere at the Paul Klee end of the modern spectrum than for his involvement in architecture. As this book amply demonstrates, this is a situation crying out for redress. Though Hundertwasser produced only a relative handful of built projects, they stand out in the history of architecture no less than the equally few works of the equally eccentric but much more famous Antonio Gaudi. In Hundertwasser as in Gaudi, we find a reverence for the forms and processes of nature, but where Gaudi's interest was almost exclusively spiritual - to emulate nature was to reveal and honor God - Hundertwasser is concerned with the importance of nature to living a good human life, not least because we are so irrevocably parts of it. His roofs wherever possible are grassed; trees occupy apartments as 'tree tenants'; floors and walls undulate like the earth underfoot; patches of color grow over his facades like exotic fungus, unconstrained by logical right angles; brilliantly glazed cubes pile on spheres like children's building blocks to form columns, chimneys and towers. The result imparts a sense of play, freedom and nature that one can't help but feel would be far more fun to live and work in than virtually anything else in our built environment. The book is blissfully free of academic essays telling us more than we ever wanted to know about the alleged meaning or place in art history of Hundertwasser's works. Such text as there is either taken from Hundertwasser himself - "The lines I trace with my feet walking to the museum are more important than the lines I will find hanging on the walls inside" - or consist of simple explanations of the dozens of large, well-reproduced photographs of his work. And thank goodness for that. For while it is interesting to discover the coherent, humanistic, conservationist ideas behind the work - summed up in the subtitle: 'For a more human architecture in harmony with nature' - what we really need to know, to experience, is the body of work itself. This book delivers that experience as well as anything short of being there could. As we close the covers and look out the window at our prosaic surroundings, we find ourselves wishing, in this time of rising environmental concern and growing dehumanisation, that the spirit of Hundertwasser was more in evidence. I hope every school of architecture has this in its library."
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