Hundertwasserhaus Vienna

The Hundertwasserhaus is a municipal apartment building at the corner of Löwengasse and Kegelgasse in Vienna's 3rd district, designed by artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and architect Joseph Krawina and constructed between 1983 and 1985. It was Hundertwasser's first completed architectural work, delivered at a cost of over €7 million and inaugurated to immediate international attention. The building comprises 52 apartments, four offices, 16 private terraces, and three communal roof terraces — all wrapped in a facade of undulating floors, onion-domed columns, mismatched windows, and vivid mosaic tiles in red, gold, blue, and ochre. No two windows are alike; Hundertwasser famously declared that a person should be able to lean out of their window and, as far as their arms can reach, do what they like with the exterior wall — a principle he called the "window right."

Philosophically, the building is a direct attack on what Hundertwasser called the "straight line," which he condemned as "godless and immoral." Where modernist architecture imposed geometric uniformity, Hundertwasser answered with organic irregularity: floors deliberately slope and undulate underfoot, and more than 250 trees and shrubs — his celebrated "tree tenants" — grow from window boxes, terraces, and roof gardens. Some 900 tonnes of earth were used to construct the rooftop terraces alone. The building remains the property of the City of Vienna, which rents the apartments through its public housing program, meaning genuine residents have lived here since 1986. Hundertwasser himself refused any architect's fee for the project, stating it was worth it to prevent "something ugly from being built in its place."

Visitors cannot enter the residential areas, but the exterior is entirely accessible and endlessly photogenic. The Löwengasse-facing side reveals the full depth of the facade's texture — mosaic column bases, tree branches emerging from sills, and balconies tiled in contrasting geometric patterns. Embedded within the building's ground floor on this side is the Kunst-Café im Hundertwasserhaus, a small café whose interior carries the same artistic DNA as the facade, with curved walls, hand-painted surfaces, and Hundertwasser-influenced furnishings. Directly across the street stands the Hundertwasser Village (completed 1991), a small retail arcade in the same visual language that provides an additional close-up view of the decorative vocabulary.

For a deeper engagement with the artist's work, the Kunst Haus Wien — a museum Hundertwasser redesigned from a former furniture factory, opened in 1991 — is a ten-minute walk away and presents permanent and rotating exhibitions of his paintings and graphic works. It is the only Hundertwasser-designed interior in Vienna that the public can fully explore. When visiting the Hundertwasserhaus, arrive in the morning on weekdays to avoid the densest tourist traffic; the building faces east and catches strong morning light that brings out the intensity of the mosaic colors on the facade. The nearest tram stop is Hetzgasse, served by line 1.