Hundertwasser's comment on the work

The two pictures [556 and 533] belong together and form a huge wall of windows on which a house becomes a steamboat. The house and steamboat are one and have a thousand windows. I wrote a poem about this, "The Death of the Thousand Windows". In the house, on the roof, on the chimney and in the windows meadows grow organically, recognisable as the sections of tree trunks or like sedimentation. Befriended windows unite or divide for lack of understanding, or to propagate. The sidewalk becomes a sea. The house is aflow and constantly changing. The same way you cannot tell a cloud, a river, a person to stand still, not to move, to stay immobile like a photograph, the house must change in order to live, or else it is dead.(from: Hundertwasser Architecture, Cologne, 1997, p. 28)The paintings 533 and 556 belong together and were a main attraction at the Salon de Mai in Paris in 1962. These were my first paintings in my new studio on the Giudecca, in Casa de Maria, where you could look out on San Marco, towards Zattere and Marghera, and where the big ocean liners (bâtiments, as the French put it so beautifully) went by right in front of your nose. It was like a dream, a dream which I had been painting for years. Floating houses have round windows. These ocean-going giants were higher and bigger than the Palazzo Ducale and St. Mark's; they cut off the view of Venice when they came by. The contrast between historic stone palaces and floating steel monsters cannot be greater. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 458)