Could you live without straight lines?

Think about it: The only perfectly straight lines that a caveman would ever see were sunbeams. In short, straight lines are rarely seen in nature, yet our homes and our cities are filled with them.

The maverick Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser called straight lines “the devil’s tools,” and felt that straight lines “make people sick because, not occurring in nature, they incessantly subject people to an irritation for which the organism is unprepared.”

His philosophies are evident in his “Waldspirale” (“Forest Spiral”) Hundertwasser House, built in Darmstadt, Germany, in the early part of this century:

“It contains 105 apartments, a parking garage, a kiosk as well as a café and a bar (the last two being located at the top of the spiral). The inner courtyard contains a playground for the children of the residents and a small artificial lake. Peculiarities of the U-shaped building are the unique facade, which does not follow a regular grid organization, and the windows, which appear as if they were ‘aus der Reihe tanzen,’ (dancing out of line) everywhere different and appearing out of order, often with ‘tree tenants’ – trees growing out from the windows. The diagonal roof, planted with grass, shrubs, flowers and trees, rises like a ramp along the U-form. At its highest point, the building has 12 floors.

“The windows of the Waldspirale, which number over 1000, are all unique: no two windows are the same. Similarly, different handles are attached in each apartment to the doors and windows. Some of the apartments are decorated in Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s personal style and exhibit the colourful tiles in the bath and kitchen that are characteristic of his work. Furthermore, all the corners are rounded off in these apartments along the roof and walls in an application of Hundertwasser’s dogma ‘gegen die gerade Linie’ or ‘against the straight line.’”