THE WINDOW DICTATORSHIP

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Some people say houses consist of walls. I say houses consist of windows.

When different houses stand next to each other in a street, all having different window types, i.e. window races, for example an Art Nouveau house with Art Nouveau windows next to a modern house with unadorned square windows, followed in turn by a Baroque house with Baroque windows, nobody minds.

But should the three window types of the three houses belong to one house, it is seen as a violation of the racial segregation of windows. Why? Each individual window has its own right to life.

According to the prevailing code, however, if window races are mixed, window apartheid is infringed. Everything is there: racial prejudice, racial discrimination, racial policy, racial ideology, racial barriers, with fateful impact of window apartheid on man. The apartheid of window races must cease. For the repetition of identical windows next to each other and above each other as in a grid system is a characteristic of concentration camps. In the new architecture of satellite towns and in new administration buildings, banks, hospitals and schools, the levelling of windows is unbearable.

Individuals are never identical and defend themselves against these standardising dictates either passively or actively, depending on their constitution: either with alcohol and drug addiction, exodus from the city, cleaning mania, television dependency, inexplicable physical complaints, allergies, depressions and even suicide, or alternatively with aggression, vandalism and crime.

 

Published in:

UNO Magazin & Society. Zeitschrift der österreichischen Liga für die Vereinten Nationen. Vol. 51, No. 301/1997, p. 47 (German)

Rand, Harry: Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Cologne: Taschen, 1991, p. 168, abridged edition 1993 and edition 2003, p. 146

Hundertwasser Architecture. For a More Human Architecture in Harmony with Nature. Cologne: Taschen, 1997, p. 78 and Edition 2007, p. 60

Hundertwasser – KunstHausWien. Cologne: Taschen, 1999, p. 17

Hundertwasser. New York: Parkstone Press International, 2008, p. 172