The Verchimelungsmaifest Gegen Den Rationalismus Der...

This manifesto, originally called the â€Å"Verchimelungsmaifest gegen den Rationalismus in der Architektur†, has been presented during a recitation in the Abbey of Seckau, in Austria, on the 4th of July 1958, by his author Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Hundertwasser (Friedrich Stowasser; born 15 December 1928 in Vienna) was an Austrian visionary architect, artist and spiritual ecologist, founder of the â€Å"Transautomatism† theory and style. He believed that he was at the vanguard of the Avant-guard, transcending the automatism of the Tachism and the Informalism, reaching this way an ultimate unsurpassable point, from which all improvements and efforts can be inspected and organized as a meaningful whole. He often referred to himself as the architecture doctor, redesigning functional and industrial building into art pieces. Abstract This paper deals with the idea that everyone should have freedom in architecture, the same freedom that everyone has in painting and sculpture: to produce any kind of work and afterwards exhibit it. This freedom can only be achieved if we let everyone build his own dwellings and be the architect-bricklayer-occupant of the building, as this is the only way for the man to regain his critical-creative function, without which he cannot exist as a human being. The author compares people living in buildings built following functional architecture rules, to animals living in cages, all equally foreign to the nature of the â€Å"cage†. Straight lines are