Everything which is horizontal under the open sky belongs to nature.

(Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Concrete Utopias for the Green City, 1983)

Starting with the Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture, in which he opposed the “straight line” and demanded freedom to build for all people in 1958, Hundertwasser followed up with Speech in the Nude for the Right to a Third Skin and the manifesto Loose from Loos, increasingly and ever more profoundly writing against the building culture at the time, which he deemed nature- and people unworthy. He was a visionary in the areas of architecture and ecology, and it took accordingly long until he was able to implement his demands for “tree tenants”, the “window right”, “roof forestry” or the “uneven floor” in real life. Not all utopias that Hundertwasser had envisioned in the area of nature-friendly construction withstand today’s scientific criteria. However, this does nothing to undermine his merits in rooting ecological thinking in people’s minds.

Even his early paintings show vegetative forms pictured next to architectonic themes like windows, gables, fences, and gates. More concrete ideas of nature- and people-friendly buildings are documented in the exhibition with the watercolour 867 High-Rise Building for Trees and People and 839 Löwengasse – The Third Skin, which was created in 1982 during the planning stages of the “Hundertwasserhaus”.