Friedensreich Hundertwasser Quotes

Friedensreich Hundertwasser's grand, sly commentary on architecture and freedom offers a fresh, imaginative perspective.

22 quotes

1. A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.

2. There are no evils in Nature, there are only evils of Man.

3. Everyone should be able to build, and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.

4. We must at last put a stop to having people move into their quarters like chickens and rabbits into their coops.

5. Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. m tocaronm muxo los huvo xdxdxd soi galo el d barakaldo c.f y soi masoca

6. 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.

7. The straight line is godless.

8. The line I trace with my feet walking to the museum is more important and more beautiful than the lines I find there hung up on the walls.

9. Visual pollution is more poisonous than any other pollution because it kills the soul.

10. Everything is so infinitely simple, so infinitely beautiful...

11. When we dream alone it is only a dream, but when many dream together it is the beginning of a new reality.

12. Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

13. The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity.

14. The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating line.

15. Paradises an only be made with our own hands, with our own creativity in harmony with the free creativity of nature.

16. Only when architect, bricklayer and tenant are a unity, or one and the same person, can we speak of architecture. Everything else is not architecture, but a criminal act which has taken on form.

17. You are a guest of nature - behave.

18. If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest.

19. If one person dreams alone... It is only a dream. When many people dream together... It is the beginning of a new reality.

20. If we do not honor our past, we lose our future. If we destroy our roots, we cannot grow.

21. Our real illiteracy is our inability to create

22. “A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.”