99% Invisible - 134- The Straight Line Is A Godless Line

Episode Date: October 1, 2014

Straight lines form the core of our built environment. Building in straight lines makes predicting costs and calculating structural loads easier, since building materials come in linear units. Straight lines might be logical, predictable, and efficient, but they are also … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Almost without fail, an architectural draft starts with one straight line, and then another, and another, a succession of clean orderly lines until eventually, a building emerges. And it makes sense that straight lines form the core of our built environment. They're cost-efficient, materials like wood and steel and pipes come in straight linear units, although that's a bit of a topology. But it's certainly easier to calculate structural loads

on rectilinear surfaces. Straight lines are logical, predictable. And they are completely devoid of humanity. So says producer Louisa Beck. Actually, it's not my argument. It's this guy's. The straight line is coldless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line,

but an imitating line, a line line, a coward line. This is 1,000 sassar, Friedensreich, Regentag, Dunkelbund, 100 Wasser. In German, that means multi-talented piece filled rainy day dark colored 100 waters. It's a name he gave himself. Which makes sense because for 100 water, radical self expression was everything. Even tended on to buildings are subject to sensation. Such regulations are characteristic of prisons, cages and stables. This is from a speech Hunat Vasa gave in 1983

at the Architectural Association in London. He was known for giving talks, wearing mismatched, wild colored socks and wacky hats, or showing up completely naked. That day, though, he was fully clothed. He looked out into a room full of architects and told them they were criminals, planning lifeless, rigid structures that restricted human creativity. The time has come for people to rebel against their confinement in duplicate constructions like prisoners or evidence in cages. A confinement which is alien to human nature.

Hunalvasa was born Frédéric Stuvasa in 1928. He made a name for himself, so to speak, as a painter. He was known for squiggly, abstract, nearly psychedelic paintings. And in 1985, he completed a building, an apartment complex in his home city, Avanna. Hunter Rasser House looks as if one of his paintings had been made manifest. It's full of asymmetrical shapes, wacky colors, clashing patterns, mismatched windows, and unrelating uneven floors. There are no godless, straight lines inside.

Working together with architects and engineers, Hunat Vasa went on to design more buildings all over Vienna. His work really sticks out in that city, almost all the other buildings there are stately baroque. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Hunat Vasa went on to design all kinds of other structures, like gas stations, heating plants, and schools. And his were known extended beyond Vienna. He was hired to design buildings in Germany, Japan, New Zealand. He made one building in the US, a winery in Nebavalle.

His architecture is fastuned with golden orbs and onion domes, zigzagging tiles, trees that grow out of apartment windows. He dreamed of creating indoor, moss-covered floors, though he was never able to get that approved. I think you get it. Hunter Vossar designed some crazy-looking buildings. Many architectural circles dismiss Hunter Vossar's work as Kitch. They look like buildings from Dr. Seuss or PV's playhouse or any number of children's cartoons. But Hundert Vassa actually got them built. And to him, they weren't just gimmicks.

Real people live in his buildings. He was trying to reframe what the built environment can be, to reimagine what architecture is supposed to do. Today architecture is criminalist. Today architecture is criminally sterile, he says. One of these Hunnadvasar buildings stands in Macdeburg, the city where I was born. Macdeburg is in what used to be communist East Germany,

and it's one of those cities full of endless grids and straight lines. Its rows and rows of gray, Soviet-style apartment blocks and post-war architecture. Until you walk onto the main street in the city center and encounter this huge eight-story tall castle. And this castle is bright, pink salmon pink and it's decorated with brown tiled squiggles like big ceramic vines creeping up the pink walls There are almost 900 windows of all different shapes and sizes and 150 different lollipop looking columns hold up the building's floors on the roof hold up the building's floors. On the roof, eight golden spheres rise triumphantly, like sons over the dull homogenous blocks around them. Parts of the roof

slope all the way down to the street and it's covered in trees. This is why, even though the building is mostly pink, it's called the Green Citadel. Residents of Maktable grappled with what to make of this gigantic, treetop salmon pink castle. Everyone has different opinions about it, including my grandparents, who live about a 20-minute walk from the Green Citadel in Moktaborg. I talked to them about it the last time I went back to visit. An annum stand ought to be better.

I have to say that I looks like a monkey house. I ask him why, and he grunts about the colorful facade and wavy surface. It just doesn't fit. But my grandma, she likes it. In fact, she likes to live in it. It breaks with the sameness that is so typical of East Germany. As my grandmother describes it, quote, the 40 communist years we lived in the same concrete high rises.

And here is an apartment building that represents the uniqueness of each resident, and Hunatvasa realized this. In my opinion, she says, there should be more buildings like it. Too bad he passed away. Plans for the Green Citadel began in 1996 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hunter Vosser died in 2000 2000 while at sea on the QE2. The Green Citadel was completed five years later. 80% of the Green Citadel's covered in grass and the building has what Hunet Vassa called tree tenons, trees that were planted into special rooms inside of people's apartments. And his ideas about how to incorporate flora into buildings didn't stop with plants and trees. Hunatvasa was also really into mold, like the kind of mold that grows in the back of the fridge.

When it all grows moldy, and the mold exhibits unusual patterns, or when moss grows over the geometric angus of the corner of your house, together with mushrooms and vegetation, life moves into a sterile house. And as delightful as Hunter Vossars warped in kaleidoscopic buildings are, the exaltation of mold is where he and I part ways. At least we know he didn't suffer from allergies.

Instead of TV, it is better to watch nature grow wild and grow out of human control. For instance, in the case of spontaneous vegetation. Oh boy. Hunant Vasa was big on manifestos. He had another one that he called, and I'm not making this up, the holy s**t manifesto. Every time we use the flash toilet, we think it is an hygienic accomplishment. But in fact, we violate the laws of nature.

We pray before we eat and we say grace afterwards. But we do not pray when we s**t. Everything taking humans away from nature or any of our natural processes was in a front to Hunter Vossar. So his buildings were designed to keep us more in touch with our disgusting organic reality. If we do not treasure our sh** and if we do not transform it into humus, in honor of God and the world, we lose our right to be present on this earth.

Humus is the part of the soil that's rich and dark with organic matter. Who in advance have proposed to plan natural urine purification systems and compost toilets in his buildings? Although his investors wouldn't back indoor compost toilets in the green citadel, when Luisa was last in Germany, she talked her way into the building. This is the shower that he put in for the bathroom they used blue tiles as a room. And also there's no straight lines here either. Oh, none.

None. I visited a bathroom in the green citadel. I didn't see any composting toilets. I didn't even see any mold. What I did see though were crazy patterns. Let me just feel, look at this. You have like round corners all over the apartment. There are no like sharp and crisp corners here. Nicole Zanda and her partners Abastan live in the green citadel.

Like you said, we have two bathrooms, one with the tub and one with just a shower. The bathroom tiles are staggered and slightly shifted sideways so that they don't line up and columns. In some places, they're tilted diagonally or shattered and their fragments put back together to form a unique mosaic-like pattern. They showed me around their place. You see, this is a different kind of window.

It opens up all the way, and it's got that round on top of it. Now we'll get into the parts of Hunter Vosser's manifesto-laden worldview that is blissfully free of mold and excrement and appeals to our sense of individuality. For Honehadeva said, the goal was to construct a creative lifestyle for the people who lived and worked in and around the Green Citadel. He designed the building to encourage residents, individuality to shine forth.

And it wasn't just in terms of how he built the Green Citadel. Part of it were the rules that govern day. The apartment house had must have the freedom to lean out of this window and as far as its arms can reach to change the outside walls of its buildings. Hunat was the encouraged residents to lean out of their windows and paint the facade around them any color and design they wanted. He called this concept Fenstachricht or right of window. When he says prisoners, he's referring to you and me. The idea was close your second skin, your home is your third skin. And if we choose our own clothes, why shouldn't renters choose the colors for their outside walls, at least around the window?

Hunter Vossar believed that residents painting their windows, their homes, would be a form of their own self-expression. He wasn't explicitly demanding that residents lean out their windows and their homes, would be a form of their own self-expression. He wasn't explicitly demanding that residents lean out their windows and paint the borders around them, but he was hoping to design an environment that would encourage them to do it of their own free will. I asked Sebastian and Nicole the Greensett Adel residents if they thought about taking him up on his right of window idea. So far, only one person has taken Hunaed Vasa up on the right of window here, and the

modifications were pretty minor. The building manager told me that he hasn't received a single application from anyone else requesting to paint the exterior facade around their window to exercise their fence to right. We took a quick poll here in the office and both Sam and I would feel a little too intimidated to have hazardly paint the outside of our window on an already amazing building. Avery would be leaning outside to paint on day one, and Katie would be out there on a window washer's rig painting up a storm in a hot minute.

I generally love the right of window idea, even if I wouldn't necessarily participate, but it also feels a little like forced fun. Like being required to take a day off of work to play wacky games with their co-workers on a company retreat or audience participation that stick to their theater or having a pop album appear automatically on your phone. It's mainly fun for people designing the experience. That's the irony in all of this. Who knew as a fought against architectural doctrine so that people could be free to express themselves. But only as he wanted them to. In many ways, in addition to being brilliant objects of art,

Hunter Vosser's buildings were like concept cars or high fashion. A three-wheeled car with a bubble roof or six-foot tall for hats are not meant for the mats market, but radical concepts move to norm forward. You certainly do not want a house for the mold. You really don't. It's terrible. But just try to find an urbanist these days, who is not all for green roofs. And that's what the big talking naked speech-giving manifesto writers of the world are for. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Luisa Beck with Avery Troubleman Sam Greenspan Katie Mingle and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced in beautiful downtown Oakland, California, out of the offices

of ArcSide, who we check in with on so many of our stories. I think it's a reaction to Eastern European Soviet block style architecture. This makes a lot of sense when you look at it. What I want to see this become the norm probably not, but I think it's always healthy to have a variety of things. This is about a city who has the foresight to say, yeah, these art pieces as architecture are important. I shudder to think at the number of little mistakes we would make if we didn't have Adam and Daniel and the whole crude arc sign

at the desks right next to us to answer our questions. Oh my god. Thanks for being there, guys. Radio Tapio. From PRX.