"Today, just like 100 years ago, urbanism must obey the most severe dogmatic rules. An urban planner must have the courage to chose plurality, especially when it is about romanticism and what is qualified as kitsch.
THE ABSENCE OF KITSCH MAKES OUR LIFE UNBEARABLE.
THE ABSENCE OF KITSCH MAKES OUR LIFE UNBEARABLE.
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| 1977-86 Hundertwasserhaus, Viena (Hundertwasser Architecture) |
Architecture is always dominated by the totalitarian scheme of authority and those subjects who submit to it.
Architect and architecture are the reigning masters. Architecture's inhabitants and users are key. An urban planer should not become a minion of an international doctrine, poor and mediocre, which is currently in fashion.
Modernity has nothing revolutionary; it is the comeback to the human, to human dimensions, to the dreams of the individual, it is because of this it is revolutionary.
But fashion urban planers continue to abuse the man-inhabitant as if he was a guinea pig for dogmatic, educational and absurd architecture experiments.
Linearity, which is an alignment of windows the same size, absolutely straight skyline, flat floor, aggressive edges in straight angles are the signs of an oppressive architecture.
Architecture must elate man and not subject it. Just an urban planner who allows one building of a hundred to be different, away from the system of a totalitarian straight-line grid, especially industrial buildings which must be allowed to have the mark of a human romanticism."
Hundertwasser, F. (1993) Espace pour habiter - Espace pour vivre - Pour un autre politique du logement.
Entrevista escrita para una discusión, editada por la SPD Bundestagsfraktion, Bonn. Preguntas de Norbert mappes.Niediek, marzo 1993.
En: Taschen (1997) Hundertwasser Architecture. Pour une architecture plus proche de la nature et de l'homme. Köln: Taschen.
