Hundertwasser's comment on the work

With the Village for my friend Kalke I was acting as architecture doctor, you might say. That is, don't tear down and rebuild, but use existing building fabric and improve it by changing or adding to the building and inserting components with new forms and colours. I am opposed to destruction and favour a constant evolution in the direction of harmony with nature and individual creativity. Because of this I have been given the derogatory name of a prettifier, which I bear with pride. The Kalke Village was a workshop for automobile tyres, and I succeeded in preventing a normal, straight-lined, five-storey house from being built, so the exterior state and the original height remained intact. On the roof a veritable forest is growing (...), and inside it is something like a nooked-and-crannied, romantic, oriental bazaar (...).Of course, the unwanted and uncontrollable commercial exploitation of my person is saddening. This commercialism is really just as horrible as robbing the dead. (...) You are at the mercy of the profiteers (...). Trying to put a stop to commercialism is like fighting windmills. Should the painter stop painting or intentionally produce bad and useless things so they can't be sold because nobody wants them? Or should he regard the commercialism of his person and works as recognition and use it as a lever and mouthpiece to lend greater thrust and publicity to his message? (...)(Hundertwasser at the opening of the Village near Hundertwasser House, June 1991, in: Hundertwasser Architecture, Cologne, 1997, p. 29