MANIFESTO
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Hundertwasser about THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG
Nature as analogy of creation.
Nature as relation between past, present and future.
Nature as everlasting valid creation.
A more natural and humane architecture.
Nature, art, and creation are one unit, but we separated them from another. If we rape the creation of nature, we will ruin the creation in us, we will destroy ourselves. Only nature is able to teach us creation and creativity. The truth is that we don’t know how to be creative, that we are incapable of being creative. Man’s desire for a home and a life in harmony with nature and its individual creativity is tremendous.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG is an unusual architecture project. An oasis for humanity and nature between thousands of streamlined buildings. It shall fulfil man’s longings for romanticism. The romanticism that negates, and tries to eliminate, the efficient architecture with its fatal sterile fanaticism.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG, although with certain strictness traditionally aligned into the surroundings of the Cathedral, is a revolutionary and innovative building that represents the future in which nature and man’s dreams will get back to high significance. A building, Magdeburg will be proud of.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG is balance and connected at once between the past, present and future.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG increases cultural assets and is enrichment for man and nature.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG will grow like an organism. It’s not a soulless, aggressive block.
Architecture shouldn’t synchronise and abase people, it shall raise them up, serve them. Humans must have the possibility to feel safe inside architecture, to be at home in it. Architecture should be able to be man’s third skin. In concrete, our towns are crazy shaped ideas of those architects who don’t care about Hippocrates’ oath which should say:
"I will not build homes by which nature and human’s soul will suffer."
Architecture must be an alive, permanently changing, and growing organic unit. The blind, cowardly and moronic way of using geometric straight lines in architecture has turned our cities into wildernesses, both in a mental and ecological sense. If Hundertwasser’s architecture projects would "be nothing" or "bad and unacceptable" as some affirm, they would never be as popular as they are in peoples minds all over the world.
Why do millions of visitors come in busses to see Hundertwasser’s works?
Why do all of the projects work? No matter if it is an industrial plant in which people work better and more efficiently because they are more self-confident and proud to work in a more natural and human oriented building!
Why are the tenants of Hundertwasser’s buildings delighted to live a calmer life in an acclimatised oasis amongst a concrete jungle?
Why are students in a Hundertwasser school a lot more satisfied, happy and open?
Why are the chances of healing a lot better in the Hundertwasser redesigned oncology ward of the university hospital of Graz?
Critics never mention:
- that more than 20 different species of birds were counted in the forests on the roofs of the Hundertwasser House in Vienna;
- that storks nestle on the church of Bärnbach, kestrels right under the cupola of the district heating plant Spittelau and that annually five duck families choose the KunstHausWien as their home, until they are too many;
- that hammocks between the trees on their roof delight the tenants, that through the use of trees and vegetation the thermal insulation is more efficient and two-thirds of heating and climatisation costs can be saved;
- that the atmosphere around Hundertwasser’s buildings becomes considerably better: conspicuously more oxygen, better humidity balance, dust and noise protection and water retention in the roof gardens;
- that construction workers of Hundertwasser buildings are pleased of a new creative work ethic and have problems adapting back to normal construction sites where, as they assemble prefabricated houses, they are treated as slaves;
- that for the first time ever in the history of architecture, a "window right" is part of a rental contract; people have the right to design their windows as they want, both inside and out. In Vienna and Plochingen, Austria, tenants exercise this right;
- that, if houses are not built dogmatically and soullessly but rather with love, then all architectural styles do harmonise and heart and soul have become one in them;
- that in more humanely designed buildings the crime, drug and suicide rates run so low, that Hundertwasser’s architecture, in harmony with nature and man’s dreams, becomes every time more important, regarding crime control as well as crime prevention.
- that more and more tenants increasingly prefer to spend additional time in the forests on their roofs of their home rather than flee to the countryside;
- that, for the first time in 100 years, industrial and functional buildings like warehouses, gas stations, motorways, public toilets, incineration and district heating plants become more human and nature oriented, and therefore appear attractive like a home.
Hundertwasser’s buildings seem to be the liberty that mankind has been yearning for. Art for art’s sake is aberrance; art which hurts doesn’t warrant consumption. Architecture for architecture’s sake is a crime; we cannot escape from a house we have to live in.
The optical pollution of the environment is the cruellest one because it sickens the human soul.
THE GREEN CITADEL® OF MAGDEBURG is a place of recreation and joyousness. It is an amendment for the anonymous, cold and inhuman modern architecture á la mode.
It’s the architect’s great aim to lead man back into the paradise that seemed lost.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
New Zealand, April and December 1999