AIRPLANE DECOR

Taken from the massive volume Hundertwasser Architecture: For a more human architecture in harmony with nature, published by Taschen.

When I introduced Tran and Hillary to Hundertwasser's stuff, they observed that the finished building was almost indistinguishable from the model - which says as much about H-W's Play-Doh sensibility as it does for the skill of his model-makers. But it's extremely interesting to look at these models, made much earlier under H-W's direction but by one Peter Manhardt.

What I like about them, aside from their quaint model-train-set realization, is that they are Hundertwasser buildings that don't look at all like Hundertwasser buildings. No multicolored tile, no drippy-tear doodads, no bulbous rainbow columns. That stuff is (sometimes) charming to me, but I can see where it turns people off. Here, aside from the use of forbidden grids of repetitious windows, the ideas of Hundertwasser are executed in a way that bears none of his stylistic tics.

At one point in one of his various manifestos and screeds, Hundertwasser compares himself to the guy who first starts singing in a crowd of people, each hesitant to be the first. While this is, on one level, typical self-serving hippie arrogance ("I'm my own man, maaan"), it's also an insistence by the man that he not be taken as an Artist coming in and making buildings beautiful, never to be touched again. He wants other people to follow his lead, not by copying his style but by expressing their own. Hence the infinitely-repeated assertion that people need to be able to alter the outside surfaces of apartment buildings they rent in, etc etc.

So you could have no appreciation at all for Hundertwasser's style, but still agree with him on fundamental principles. These models express that idea, which has I think gotten unfortunately somewhat lost as H-W became ensconced as a culutural treasure, and his specific "look" became a schtick to be commissioned and copied for tourist-attraction purposes.

Note, of course, that he was generally kind of a hypocrite about all this. He seemed to have a habit of bothering his clients following the completion of the buildings, to (politely!) point out everything that had been done wrong and needed to be fixed, to keep the building from becoming "a laughingstock." For example, "The big blue corner columns on the tower have red ceramics strewn in! Like disco-bar decorations! That must go! Nowhere in the plans!"

In a related vein, I wonder how to interpret the model pictured here in the context of Hundertwasser's later statement (concerning the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna) that "overhanging building portions with no support are probably intended to demonstrate the daring of the architect and statical engineer, but they only produce discomfort in anybody standing under them."

This splendid thang was fashioned years ago from pieces of some kind of "stone crispies" material mixed with molars.

It's a wall I'd never like to see a wreckingball come at!, but bldgs in Detroit are ongoingly vulnerable to demo, as part of the city's emptying-out process.

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In downtown Detroit on May 28th, 2011, along the north side of Macomb Street east of Gratiot Avenue.