TREE TENANT LETTER
Dear Giulio Macchi,
I am very honoured to participate in the Triennial of Milan.
I want to realise the following environment project: a tree or several trees growing out of the windows. Big trees from the third or fourth floors, for example. In a house at the exhibition or not far from it. This is to be something permanent, not just for the exhibition.
To give an example: in the monotonous, sterile city, so much space is not lived in. So why shouldn’t a tree instead of a person live in a flat if there is a shortage of oxygen? All you need is a window of a flat and a little space behind it. This is very important and can revolutionise the city more than by covering the roofs with forests. For the tree tenants leaning out of the windows can be seen from afar, everybody can derive pleasure from them; but the roof gardens and forests cannot be seen from the street.
The space rented to the tree must be insulated up to the height of the windowsill with a layer of Pirelli rubber or plastic sheeting or other material and then filled with water for a week to see if everything is watertight.
The flats will then be filled up to the windowsills with earth in two layers, first lecca or pumice, then light humus or peat, with a water-permeable foamy-plastic layer in between.
The tree tenants are lifted into the flats through the windows with the aid of cranes, with the roots standing in the earth and the crown rising up in the air above the street.
The roots are buried in the dark room, the foliage grows into the bright daylight.
The windows must always remain open, without windowpanes, so that air, rain, heat, cold, wind, snow can get in.
This is the new living space of the tree tenant, who happens to have different needs from the human tenant. The room must be totally insulated from the rest of the building by insulation specialists. The rainwater must be conducted from the roof by a pipe and the overspill drained off through a second pipe.
The cars have ousted the trees into upper floors. The sterile vertical walls of the canyons of buildings, under whose aggressivity and tyranny we daily suffer, will be like green valleys where man can breathe freely.
A tree tenant is an ambassador of the forest.
The tree tenant pays his rent with oxygen, his capacity for absorbing dust, as an anti-noise machine which produces quiet, by eradicating toxins, purification of the contaminated rainwater, as a producer of happiness and health, as a bringer of butterflies and with its beauty and in many other currencies.
This can all be converted to money and is more than a human tenant can pay with a check.
Hundertwasser
Written in Auckland, New Zealand on 9 June 1973 (winter) for the Milan Triennial of 1973.
Published in:
contatto. arte/città. Quindicesima triennale. La nuova foglio editrice: Pollenza – Macerata, 1973 (Italian)
Umwelt. Eine kritische Stellungnahme. (Environment. A critical comment.) Friedensreich Hundertwasser – HA Schult. edited by JUNIOR Galerie: Goslar/Germany (Italian, German)
Exhibition catalogue for Haus der Kunst, Munich 1975. Glarus/Switzerland: Gruener Janura AG, 1975, pp. 369-370 (German)
Österreicher, die der Welt gehören. (Austrians who belong to the world) edited by Mobil Oil Austria AG, Vienna. Vienna: Brüder Rosenbaum Verlag 1979, p. 94 (German)
Catalogues of the World Travelling Museum Exhibition 1975–1987: French edition: Paris, Luxembourg, Marseille, Cairo, 1975; Copenhagen, Dakar, 1976; Montreal, Brussels, 1978. English edition: Tel Aviv, Tokyo, 1976; Cape Town, Pretoria, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasilia, Caracas, 1977; Mexico City, Toronto, 1978; Rome, Høvikodden, 1980; Helsinki, 1981; London, 1983. German edition: Warsaw, 1976; Pfäffikon/Lake Zurich, 1979; Cologne, 1980; Vienna, Graz, 1981.
Das Hundertwasser Haus (The Hundertwasser House). Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag/Compress Verlag Vienna, 1985, p. 116 (German)
Rand, Harry: Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Cologne: Taschen, 1991, p. 171, abridged edition 1993 and edition 2003, p. 149
Hundertwasser Architecture. For a More Human Architecture in Harmony with Nature. Cologne: Taschen, 1997, pp. 80-82 (English) and German edition 2006, pp. 62-64
Eichheim, Hubert; Bovermann, Monika; Tesarová, Lea et al.: Blaue Blume. Deutsch als Fremdsprache. Kursbuch – Englische Ausgabe. Ismaning/Germany: Max Hueber Verlag, 2002, p. 328 (German, excerpt)