Friedensreich Hundertwasser was born Friedrich Stowasser in Vienna in 1928, with Jewish heritage on his mother’s side. To survive the Nazi regime, he was baptized Catholic in 1935, drawing on his late father’s background, and joined the Hitler Youth, marching in straight lines while hiding who he was. After the war he lasted three months at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, then traveled Europe and North Africa with a pocket watercolor set. Noting that sto means hundred in several Slavic languages, he became Hundertwasser, hundred water, took Friedensreich, realm of peace, as his first name, and added names meaning rainy day and darkly multicolored. Seeing postwar concrete grids as a continuation of mechanized control, he called the straight line cowardly and immoral and embraced the spiral.

In the late 1950s and 1960s he issued manifestos against rationalist architecture and gave lectures naked to illustrate his theory of three skins: body, clothing, and buildings. In 1980s Vienna, working with architect Peter Pelikan, he built the Hundertwasser Haus public housing, with a concrete skeleton hidden under irregular windows, uneven floors, and trees growing from the walls, and refused payment. He lived off the grid in New Zealand’s Kaurinui Valley, and died of a heart attack in February 2000, aged 71, aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 in the Pacific.

• His window right would let every tenant paint the outside wall as far as an arm could reach
• Undulating floors were built by layering concrete, plaster, and tile on a flat structural slab
• He championed composting humus toilets and tree duty, returning built-over land to nature on rooftops
• He opposed the European Union and backed a constitutional monarchy under Otto von Habsburg as a long-term steward of nature
• He was buried naked in a shroud under a tulip tree in his Garden of the Happy Dead, and the Hundertwasser Art Centre opened in Whangarei in 2022