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Hundertwasser Art Centre

An artwork in itself, Whangārei's Hundertwasser Art Centre is a legacy of Austrian artist and activist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

The centre is the culmination of a plan first mooted in the early 1990s for Friedensreich Hundertwasser to design a building as part of his New Zealand legacy. After many ups and downs, decades later the idea for the building has been realised by Harris Butt Architecture and Heinz Springmann, an architect from Springmann Architektur in Stuttgart, Germany who was working with The Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation.

“Our first contact with the project was in 2009,” says Grant. “Effectively our role was to convert those four or five drawings into a set of working drawings that would enable us to get building consent and give enough information to put a price on it and to build it. So out of those few drawings we generated probably close to 300 drawings, which define the building.” Everyone working on the building was freeform: masons, tilers, plasterers, artists. “Everything basically related back to nature, and its ability to flow, to climb, to just do its own thing.”

ArchiPro Editorial Team. (2022, August 5). Creative Freedom Key to New Cultural Centre. ArchiPro NZ.Retrieved from: https://archipro.co.nz/project/hundertwasser-art-centre-harris-butt-architecture

Location
Northland
Completed
2022
Awards
2023 Auckland Public Architecture Awards Winner - 2023
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Hundertwasser Art Centre
Hundertwasser Art Centre
In the foreground is Te Kakano, the experimental sculptural version created as a test bed before the main build. The path spirals into the centre using the golden ratio often found in nature, says Grant, for example in the unfurling of a koru.
There is a forestation on the roof. “The plants inhabit the building just as we inhabit the building. So it's all a process of returning the space or sharing the space with nature.”
Hundertwasser Art Centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
“It's a really interesting environment to be in,” says Grant. There are other Hundertwasser inspired buildings around the world. “I think that's one of the wonderful things about all of the buildings that I've seen, they're all different. And yet, they're all the same. There’s a commonality. I would say that the one that's similar to this is the KunstHausWien Museum in Vienna.”
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
“Hundertwasser challenged the whole effect of mankind, that the way that we were acting was, in many ways, being disrespectful to what we had. And he was kind of rattling the cage a little bit. So here we are, nearly 50 years later, suddenly realising that he might have had a point.”
Hundertwasser Art Centre
Hundertwasser Art Centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
“Among some highs and lows, you only have to think of all the people that put in all this time and effort,” says Grant of decades-long collaborations to complete the project.
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre
Creative freedom key to new cultural centre

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