They say that movies can become our minds. And that certainly must be the case when it comes to Vienna. Everybody has some movie musical vision of the place.
Maybe it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos, swaying and twirling to a Viennese waltz. Others may think of Amadeus, that wonderful (and spooky) dramatisation of Mozart’s angst-filled life.
And some of you (you don’t all have to raise your hands!) might even close your eyes and see Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, singing her heart out to a set of snow-topped mountain peaks.
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Vienna isn’t anything like that (although the rest of Austria is breath-takingly beautiful, and might just make you burst out of your dirndl in song!). It is, however, a very interesting city, with a mix of the modern and the baroque. It has some amazing architecture, and it also makes you think.
When you walk around its centre, the impression you begin to develop is that Vienna is more than a bit “Frenchified”. It has a beautiful range of buildings downtown, a huge palace (the Schönbrunn) with acres of gardens (see top), and cafés all over the place.
But it’s definitely not Paris. What makes Paris so unique is the triumph of town planning. Vienna could have been the same, but somehow it must have lost its nerve.
In the mid-1800’s, when Vienna was the centre of a great world power (the Austro-Hungarian empire), it went all out. It used the best architects, quarried the finest stone, and paid carvers from all over to drape every available space with the most ornate sculptures imaginable.
You find them festooning what seems like an endless array of palaces and monuments. And then you go into a church (in my case, Peterskirche or Saint Peters), and you actually suffer a visual brain explosion.
I’ve never seen so much carving, painting and gold in any building interior (although there are a couple of Buddhist temples in Thailand that come close). If this is Germanic, it’s about as French (or Italian?) as you can get.
So that’s Vienna’s architectural heritage, and not many cities in the world come close. However, while there are lots of wonderful buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries, you also find amongst them, right in the middle of the city, a number of modern structures, all square and glass and… totally out of place. Staring at these things, you can’t help wondering how the powers-that-be let the money-that-is get away with it all?
Maybe it’s because no one seems to really live right in the centre of Vienna. In Paris, between the various business districts there are streets filled with apartments built along similar lines (and to fit in) with everything else. And it seems to be a rule that vital cities are always places where people don’t just go to work or shop. They’re also where people live their lives.
In Vienna, the apartments appear to be a bit farther out from the city centre. And to be sure, some of those buildings are lovely four or five storey baroque and neo-gothic structures.
But sprinkled amongst them (like bad fairy dust) are some of the nastiest, colour-outrageous, ready-to-fall-down-in-a-few-years straight boxes you’ll see anywhere.
And the choice of building materials appears to be, well, whatever someone thought was a good idea at the time. Unlike Paris, there’s no consistency in colour, or stone, or anything really.
The other issue (and I don’t know whether it’s related) is that apart from the monumental structures in praise of the Hapsburgs, much of the city seems to be in need of a good tidy and scrub.
Vienna is probably the most graffiti-laden urban landscape I’ve visited in Europe. And while I’m sure there are far worse (Naples, perhaps), this is supposedly one of the world’s greatest and most beautiful cities.
The canal that encloses the north end of the old city shows just how much out of kilter that reputation is, especially when you compare it to the Seine. The canal is of similar size, and could play a similar function to that famous Parisian waterway, if the town fathers of Vienna had only decided not to put expressways and railway tracks all along it.
It’s any wonder that the canal’s stone flood walls are so littered with the expressions of disaffected youth (my favourite was: Glaub nichts Google – Don’t believe Google).
Remarkably, though, Vienna is regarded as one of the best cities in the world to live in, and is sometimes used as an example of good town planning. If that’s the case, it must be because so much of that type of thing is so bad everywhere else.
ooOOoo
So what happened to Vienna? I’m not sure, but a clue came when I visited a place in the city with a very special link to New Zealand. Friedensreich Hundertwasser is probably the most famous Austrian-New Zealander, but Kiwis would be forgiven for not knowing anything about him.
That is, of course, unless you’ve been to Kawakawa in Northland. Once upon a time, the council in that fairly hard-bitten community on the way to the Bay of Islands decided to re-do the local public toilets.
They went into partnership on the project with an eccentric local architect, a bearded ex-pat who lived on an isolated lifestyle block bordering a nearby estuary.
The “architect” was Hundertwasser, probably one of the most famous (and certainly most controversial) figures in building design Austria has ever produced.
The Kawakawa loos are unlike any you’ll find anywhere (apart from Austria). There’s hardly a straight surface (Hundertwasser said uneven floors are a melody to the feet), and the walls incorporate a colourful array of mosaics created by locals, including, perhaps appropriately, recycled beer bottles.
You’ll also find plenty of pillars made by cutting large glazed pots down the vertical, putting the two sides around a pole, filling the pot back up with mortar, and then repeating the process all the way up to the roof. The pillars sound weird, but they are really eye-catching, and they’re a Hundertwasser trademark.
Once the Kawakawa toilets opened to the public, people finally caught on to the fact that New Zealand had a fairly notable Austrian living in its midst, and I well recall a TV interviewer asking Hundertwasser, “If you’re such a famous architect, why haven’t you designed any other buildings in New Zealand?” Hundertwasser’s reply was a classic: “Because no one’s ever asked!”
You could never say that about Austria. Hundertwasser has certainly left his mark here, even though he was a revolutionary figure in his homeland. He became a rebel because he despaired about what had happened to the Viennese architectural landscape
The change in Vienna (and many other cities, for that matter) started at the turn of the 20th century, when a movement developed, first around Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in the US, and then with Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus mates in northern Europe.
The movement, which eventually (and sadly) captured the architectural world, became more broadly known as Modernism, and is succinctly expressed in the phrase “form follows function”.
The idea was that the form or design of a building, both inside and outside, should be determined by the function the building performs. This was music to the ears of developers, for whom spending money on woodwork and filigree made very little economic (i.e., profit) sense.
Modernism taken to its n-th degree resulted in hundreds of thousands of straight rectangular buildings being erected around the world, with glass used as cladding (because it was so cheap), and the halls and entrances so abstract and soulless that they made people wonder if they should actually come inside.
If you’ve ever visited a public service building built in New Zealand in the 1960’s or 1970’s you’ll know exactly what I mean. And I can assure you that they were just as soulless to work in. Having to actually live in one, as was all the vogue in public housing developments world-wide at the same time, must have been (and still is, no doubt) crushing to the human spirit.
Austria also had its modernist proponent, whose name was Adolf Loos, and he famously declared that any sort of ornamentation on a building was an affront to the workers who constructed it. His reasoning was that only a building that looked abstract would stand the test of time, and not appear dated like the ones the Hapsburgs (and the style-conscious bourgeoisie) had built in Vienna.
Rightly or wrongly, Hundertwasser blamed Loos for all the modernist buildings that began to assert themselves on the Vienna skyline. And Hundertwasser decided to make a protest, beginning with a manifesto he read out at a very stuffy architect’s conference.
According to Hundertwasser, everyone who lived in a modern apartment building had the human right to chip off the plaster as far as they could reach out of their window, and re-decorate and re-paint it to the same distance, so that when they walked down the street, they could look up and see that they had a personal existence apart from the hundreds of other people living in the building.
Hundertwasser also put his money (in this case an apartment building) where his mouth was, and the place he built, now called Hundertwasser House, is where we decided to visit the first afternoon we were in Vienna.
The “house” is on the outskirts of the city centre, and not too far from that graffiti-lined canal that could so easily have been Vienna’s Seine. It’s right amongst several streets of modernist apartment “blocks”. But as you can imagine, it couldn’t be more different.
To begin with, the transition between the connecting building and the “house” is pure whimsy, as if the building has somehow caught a strange disease that is turning its square walls, drab colours and straight lines into a weird architectural “organism”.
Every apartment in the “house” can be identified by the fact that on the outside of that part of the building it is painted in its own colour. And the “line” defining the apartment from the others around it is anything but straight.
Every apartment also has a balcony, but not a rigid metal one that isn’t really designed to be used. The “house” balconies curve individually right out of the plaster cladding, and have bits of shrubbery and even trees growing from them.
The entrance incorporates Hundertwasser’s motifs of curves, mosaics, and yes, those pottery pillars. It also sprouts its own mini-forest of greenery. As you can imagine, when you’re walking down the street, you can identify the place at least five blocks away.
While Hundertwasser didn’t radically shift Vienna’s architecture (although his philosophy, along with many others, may hopefully be putting to death the tragedy of modernism in architecture around the world), he is important enough to Austrians that they have built a museum to his memory (Hundertwasser died on a trip home to Austria in 2000, and is buried in New Zealand).
The museum, as you can imagine, is constructed in Hundertwasser style, and flies his famous (or “infamous”, depending on who you talk to) alternative New Zealand flag, the green and white koru that some wags reckon looks like a snail.
And in addition to displays in the museum of all his famous Austrian works (including a deliriously fairy-tale church, and the weirdest waste disposal facility you’ll ever see) there’s a whole floor of New Zealand material, probably the most significant bit of New Zealand content in the city, if not the whole country.
In my mind it’s a shame he died when he did, having only just been “discovered” in New Zealand, since Hundertwasser is without doubt the most world-famous architect New Zealand never had.
“Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting…
The straight line is godless and immoral.”
– Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Mould Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture, 1958
Postscript – it seems Hundertwasser is soon to be very much celebrated in his adopted country of retirement. The Whangarei City Council, along with various contributors, has almost completed an at-times controversial Hundertwasser-themed art centre, using a plan he originally drew up for them in 1993.
It has pride of place, right at the picturesque town basin, and has all the elements the architect loved, including bright colours, twisting mosaics, an absence of straight lines, and a garden on the roof.
It will also house the Wairau Māori Art Gallery. Hundertwasser loved Maori carving and design, and he used the koru in the “alternative New Zealand flag” he once created. The gallery was always part of the plans Hundertwasser drew up, in what is now being touted as “the last authentic Hundertwasser building in the world.”
~originally composed in August, 2011~