Hundertwasser's comment on the work

Here the building in Vienna on the corner of Kegelgasse and Löwengasse is anticipated as in a dream: the varied windows, the frames, the colourful lines, the arcades and the tower. Very interesting is the person pissing on the roof, a further perscient element. During construction I noticed that urinating right in the building during construction is not only permitted, it is obligatory. For if a workman working on the eighth storey ran downstairs to urinate, the construction company would lose a lot of work time.(from: Hundertwasser Architecture, Cologne, 1997, p. 20)

This was a trade for an iron sculpture by Shinkichi Tajiri, who was just as influential in shaping my life as far as sculpture was concerned as Brô was in painting and Christian Hunziker in architecture. Tajiri had a studio in Rue d'Odessa in Montparnasse, and his alabaster-warrior and black-dragonfly iron constructions have always impressed me so much that I regarded them as a yardstick for all other sculptures.Forty years later, when I was myself working from dawn till dusk on the "Hundertwasser House", I noticed that the whole construction shell reeked of urine. When I asked the foreman and the building supervisor about it, they said it would cost the building sponsors a fortune if every bricklayer would climb down many storeys just to urinate. Half an hour's productivity loss every time. Therefore one may, indeed must, urinate wherever one is working at that moment. It was thus only much later that I understood the painted premonition of this picture. (see also 606, 348, 700) (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 246)