7 minute read
The people’s palace
WORDS: LYDIA MONIN
In Vienna, innovative social housing projects attract international tourists. Could similar projects one day do the same in New Zealand?
On our arrival in Vienna for the first time, our taxi driver recommended a lunch cruise on the Danube and visiting a selection of palaces and a social housing complex – his favourite being a curved, multicoloured extravaganza designed by an architect with a strong connection to New Zealand.
Vienna’s Hundertwasserhaus was created by painter, architect and ecologist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who believed in living in harmony with nature. It’s a red, blue, yellow, green and silver building with mosaics scattered on its walls and trees spilling out of the windows from the inside. It’s all curves and undulating surfaces, and tourists in a steady stream explore the architecture and photograph this very Viennese take on social housing. Opposite is a cluster of shops and around the corner is a café with souvenirs and an audio recording of the story of Hundertwasser’s life.
When Hundertwasser was young, his mother told him about a mysterious land on the other side of the world where people slept while he was awake and were awake while he was asleep. Hundertwasser visited New Zealand in 1973 and two years later bought a 200-hectare farm in the Kaurinui Valley in the Bay of Islands. This would be his home for much of the next three decades. He reforested the farmland, planting thousands of trees and creating canals, ponds and water-purification plants.
His signature symbol was the spiral, and in New Zealand he discovered how integral the koru, which represents the unfurling frond of the native fern, is to Māori art. He wanted his adopted country to use the koru on a secondary national flag.
“The straight line leads to the downfall of humanity,” Hundertwasser wrote. He also accused the straight line of being godless because it couldn’t be found in nature.
Richard Smart, the Hundertwasser Foundation’s New Zealand representative, wonders whether another reason for the artist despising the straight line was connected to the 69 Jewish members of his family who were killed in Nazi concentration camps.
“I can’t help imagining that these traumatic experiences affected his later thinking. The rigidity of that regime – wanting to break away from that and evoke a freer creativity and development in man.”
Richard worked as a part-time builder with Hundertwasser in the 1990s, before becoming his full-time assistant at Kaurinui. Hundertwasser was outspoken on environmental and anti-nuclear issues but reserved in private. “He was a bit of a contradiction because you’ll see in his books how he did public nude protests, which took a huge amount of courage. It really highlights how strongly he felt about the topics that he was protesting about.”
In 1993 Hundertwasser was invited to design an art gallery for Whangārei. It seemed that the project would be shelved when Hundertwasser passed away in 2000 and that his final contribution to New Zealand’s building stock would be the suitably flamboyant public toilets in Kawakawa.
But the Whangārei Mayor Stan Semenoff sent two delegates to Vienna to talk to members of the Hundertwasser Foundation, who agreed to support the art gallery project, amending it to showcase both
2 Hundertwasser’s work and Māori art. The $33.2 million Hundertwasser Art Centre with Wairau Māori Art Gallery finally opened in 2022. The public toilets in Kawakawa that had been transformed by Hundertwasser in the late 1990s into a work of art have now been recognised as a Category 1 historic place.
Hundertwasser’s building in the heart of Vienna was completed in 1985, but the city’s proud tradition of attractive, healthy social housing goes back to the 1930s and the ‘Red Vienna’ period when the Social Democrats ruled. “Air and sunlight for our children,” politicians used to say when they opened yet another big council apartment block. Their mammoth building programme and the establishment of a network of social and cultural institutions improved conditions for the working class.
One of the best examples of buildings from that era is Karl-Marx-Hof, a short train ride from the city centre. The ‘Workers’ Versailles’ stretches more than a kilometre, making it one of the longest single residential buildings in the world. Inside are 1300 apartments, laundries, bath houses, kindergartens, a library, a doctor’s surgery, shops and a museum (housed in one of the estate’s former bath houses).
In Red Vienna, life inside the new council estates was strictly controlled; there were feared caretakers and rules to be obeyed. Anna Sturm, who moved into Karl-Marx-Hof in 1929, recalled in a 1980s interview the stress of having one day a month to do all the washing.
“I always used to have nightmares about not finishing the washing ... I used to get palpitations and stomach ache and sore throats and everything.”
Today, almost every new public housing development in Vienna is subject to architectural competition, and the city council tries to attract mixed communities to avoid ghettos. More than 60 percent of the city’s population lives in some form of subsidised housing.
At one time the idea that healthy, well-designed housing shouldn’t just belong to the rich took hold in New Zealand. Richard Seddon’s Liberal government gave working-class families the chance to escape the squalid inner cities and move into bigger, healthier houses in the suburbs from 1905, but rents and travel costs proved too high and the scheme was abandoned in 1919. A couple of decades later Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage was filmed in Wellington carrying furniture into Labour’s first state house.
Gordon Wilson was the chief architect of Labour’s state housing programme. He designed thousands of single, duplex and multi-unit houses, including the Dixon Street Flats and the Berhampore Flats in Wellington, both now Category 1 historic places.
The man with a similar job to Gordon’s today is Ken Davis, the Principal Architect for state housing provider Kāinga Ora. In 1987 Ken wrote his undergraduate thesis on Gordon, titled ‘A Liberal Turn of Mind: The Architectural Work of F. Gordon Wilson 1936-1959 – A Cultural Analysis’.
“I was really interested to understand why there was such a consistent example of International Modernism at the bottom of the world,” says Ken, “and I was interested to know about the social, political and economic context that had allowed that to happen.”
New Zealand’s rich history of European immigration, he says, brought with it a different type of creativity.
Multi-unit modernist buildings were constructed with clean lines and flat roofs. But many state houses were designed as single units, and these small bungalows were criticised – unfairly in Ken’s opinion – for looking too similar.
“They were some of the earliest forms of passive solar design because living areas were oriented to the sun, as well as early forms of standardisation and refabrication. So there was a lot of thought and innovation.”
Gordon was Government Architect in 1959 when he died suddenly, and his American widow returned to live in California with their five teenage children. Two of his sons and a granddaughter became architects, and in 2019 the family approached Ken to help establish a fellowship for New Zealand architects.
The F. Gordon Wilson Fellowship for Public Housing was recently launched to promote “creative design thinking, problem solving, and new ideas and approaches to significant unmet housing needs across Aotearoa New Zealand”.
There are currently 24,000 people on the waiting list for state housing. The government public housing plan sets out to address this, says Ken, whose role, alongside other design-focused colleagues, is to improve the design quality of public housing in New Zealand.
He says Kāinga Ora is focused on building more sustainably and economically, with a range of denser housing typologies, such as duplexes, townhouses and apartments, rather than single houses on plots of land, while making sure the new homes are close to shops, schools, parks, railway stations and bus routes.
So one day in the not-too-distant future an Auckland Airport taxi driver might recommend a lunch cruise on the Waitematā Harbour, followed by a trip up the Sky Tower and then, who knows – possibly a saunter around a new state housing development?
