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The Rogner Bad Blumau thermal resort in the countryside south of Vienna (courtesy of Rogner International Hotel & Resorts) |
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Joining forces, the bad boy of Austrian architecture and a hard-line hotel magnate create a surreal--and --profitable tourist destination. by David Rocks Robert Rogner and Friedensreich Hundertwasser seem an unlikely pair: Rogner, a burly construction worker turned hotel magnate, stands erect in a crowded hotel lobby, wearing a double-breasted blue blazer, gray slacks, and a cautious floral tie, while Hundertwasser, the shaggy Viennese artist, slouches in his uniform of open-collared striped shirt, clogs with mismatched socks, loose-fitting corduroy overcoat, and baggy bright-blue pants ripped at the knee and sewn up with red thread. Rogner speaks of jobs and hotel beds and millions of schillings invested; Hundertwasser waxes lyrical about the spirituality of a building, man's relationship with nature, the healing powers of beauty and art. Rogner has lived his entire life in Austria and Germany; Hundertwasser seems happiest when traveling or living abroad: France, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, Brazil. Rogner, in short, embodies Austria's conservative establishment, while Hundertwasser represents as much daring as one is likely to find along Vienna's somber and traditional boulevards. Somehow, though, they seem to work well together. Indeed, both acknowledge that without the other's help they couldn't have created what each calls his crowning achievement. "You should go see Blumau," Hundertwasser says almost breathlessly, in his lightly accented English. "It's really the masterpiece." "This is a masterpiece from my friend Hundertwasser," Rogner says, standing before the hotel the two built together. "And this work, this small Garden of Eden in Styria, is also my masterpiece." What the two have created is the Rogner Bad Blumau thermal resort in the Styrian countryside, about 80 miles south of Vienna. After four years of construction, the hotel opened this spring and now presides over the village of Blumau, once one of Austria's poorest communities. The Styrian state government, wanting to boost investment in the region, sponsored a competition among developers for the chance to build a spa resort near the town's rich mineral springs. Rogner won, and also received some government aid and a commitment from the state to upgrade the community's infrastructure. With 271 rooms, six different saunas and steam baths, four pools, and seven restaurants, the hotel is an economic boon to the town and the region. Like its creators, the hotel has two very different personalities: On the surface, it's all Hundertwasser, an asymmetrical jumble of multicolored, flowing structures resembling eyes, the back of a deer, a gopher's hole; but underneath it's all Rogner, a solidly built and efficiently managed resort. Over the last decade, Hundertwasser has become the most famous figure in Austrian architecture, even though he and nearly every architect in Austria will tell you that he's not an architect. He has designed, with architect Peter Pelikan, more than 20 buildings or reconstruction projects in Germany and Austria and a handful of others in points as far-flung as the Canary Islands, Osaka, and Napa County. All his projects share a similar anti-Modernist aesthetic: They are colorful, playful, decorative, and about as far removed from the tenets of the Bauhaus as it is possible to imagine. As early as 1958, Hundertwasser began speaking out against the "crimes" of contemporary architecture, calling for a return to a less austere, more "natural" style of building. He has infuriated architects with a speech called "Loose from Loos," criticizing the anti-ornamentalist views of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (who, in a 1908 screed, equated ornament with crime), and with another in which he sharply rebuked the corporate architecture establishment, drawing all over a clean white wall in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's San Francisco offices. Buildings, Hundertwasser says, should function as a sort of "third skin"--after skin and clothing--for their inhabitants, to be modified and decorated as they see fit. They should include generous helpings of green--trees, grass, bushes--to bring their inhabitants closer to nature, and they should avoid the uniformity, straight lines, and sharp edges that characterize most contemporary architecture. Perhaps his best-known work is the Hundertwasser House in Vienna, a public housing project the city commissioned in 1977 after the artist had risen to prominence throughexhibitions, speeches, and television appearances. "The city of Vienna, they wanted Hundertwasser architecture, just to show if it was possible, just as an experiment," the artist tells me during a visit to his Vienna studio a few blocks from the Hundertwasser House. "The experiment worked." The building--the first large-scale project in which Hundertwasser was allowed to put his unusual theories on design to the test--stands in animated contrast to its sober Viennese neighbors. Shiny onion domes top the two towers; the facade alternates between exposed brick and plaster painted in bold blues, purples, reds, oranges, and yellows; trees grow from windows, balconies, and roofs; no two windows appear to be the same size or installed at the same level; tile mosaics grace both walls and floors; and brightly colored, ceramic-clad columns anchor the whole affair to the surrounding city streets. The project has won widespread public approval, although many local architects criticize it as being too decorative and bordering on kitsch. "Architects, generally they don't like me," Hundertwasser says, gazing out at his rooftop garden, an oasis of trees, shrubs, and grass that looks not unlike a small piece of forest in the heart of the city. "During their education in schools of architecture, they are flattened. When they get their diploma, when they're allowed to build, they are so brainwashed they can only do straight buildings. When a young person has dreams about beautiful architecture, fantastic architecture, in harmony with nature, with creativity, he has a hard time at school. All of his dreams are taken away from him. When he becomes a qualified architect, he's not capable anymore of being creative," the artist adds. Born in 1928 in Vienna, Hundertwasser turned to art full-time in the Forties, and soon adopted a painting style reminiscent of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, whose radiant colors, luminescent cityscapes, and abstract renderings of nature fascinated him. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Hundertwasser concentrated largely on painting, often choosing houses, buildings, and cities as his subject matter. "I created on canvas imaginary architecture, which I found to be more interesting than modern-day architecture," he says. Hundertwasser envisioned a more organic style of building, a living, unpredictable work that would evolve with its tenants. He imagined a return, through architecture, to our roots as creatures in harmony with the environment, with the flora and fauna of the forest and plain. In the 1970s, Hundertwasser found that he wanted to see actual buildings made from his ideas, and began experimenting with building design. "Architecture today is tired: empty and all the same--prefabricated. So I wanted to do something more variegated, like old architecture, or the naive architecture of Gaudí. Or the architecture of farmers and peasants." Instead of straight lines and sharp corners, he sought a more graceful, naturalistic line; instead of austere pairings of glass and steel, he used playful combinations of plaster, brick, and ceramic tiles; and instead of symmetry and uniformity across a building's facade, he strove for asymmetry and diversity. Above all, he sought to bring nature into the city by planting roofs with foliage and installing "tree tenants" in buildings by filling apartments with earth and growing trees and plants out of the windows. And he shortly took on a further calling as "architectural doctor"--correcting the "ills" that Modern architecture has inflicted on cities by retrofitting buildings with signature touches such as onion domes, colorful tile mosaics, and painted facades. Hundertwasser has developed a philosophical underpinning to his work that at times borders on the bizarre. He has declared that every tenant in his buildings has "window rights" that allow modification of facades to a distance of one arm's length out the window, an idea meant to inject life and personality into what he sees as the city's monotony and to allow a building's residents--not its owners or designers--to express their creativity through their surroundings. He says floors and sidewalks should not be flat or straight, so that they might better resemble forest paths. "The ruler and the T square are just primitive, stupid tools," Hundertwasser tells me as he perches on a chair tottering on the sloping floor of his studio, which sits atop Vienna's KunstHaus, a museum of his own design that is largely devoted to his work. "Our cities are so ugly because the ruler creates limited possibilities of housing," he says. "The human being cannot be pressed into a grid system without disastrous results... People don't feel well, and sometimes they don't know why. Violence is increasing. So is speed. The straight line creates speed." Over the years, Hundertwasser has evolved into a publicity juggernaut. At the KunstHaus museum, for example, visitors can see three floors of his work, and then go on to two more floors of other exhibitions. The gift shop overflows with Hundertwasser advent calendars (each window a different shape and size), Hundertwasser diaries, Hundertwasser books, posters, and more. He's designed a label for one of Austria's leading mineral waters; he campaigned against the country's new license plates, offering instead his own impressionistic take on the old-fashioned version; unsolicited, he's designed stamps and flags for countries around the world, and has appointed himself a sort of goodwill ambassador to the planet, agitating for causes that range from Middle East peace to saving the whales to ending nuclear power. He first came to Rogner's attention when the Hundertwasser House was built in Vienna, although the two didn't meet until 1993, by which time the construction magnate had made a career of building innovative hotels. Bad Blumau is the seventh in the Rogner chain, which includes the Hotel Biedermeier in Vienna, a reconstruction centered on a landmarked nineteenth-century pedestrian passageway, and the Don Giovanni in Prague, which is named after Mozart's opera and looks something like a 400-room cream-and-chocolate-covered truffle. Rogner was looking to outdo himself with his latest project, and engaging Hundertwasser seemed an ideal way to do it. As Rogner recounts it, he ran into Hundertwasser at a party and told the artist he was putting together a hotel project near a 100-degree-Celsius spring. Since Hundertwasser's name, literally trans- lated, means "Hundredwater," he seemed the natural choice to design the new spa. "It is more expensive," Rogner said of Hundertwasser's exuberantly decorative architectural style at the opening of Bad Blumau in May, "but the result is also better than if you build a normal building. You can more easily get guests in this building than if you have a building of glass and steel and concrete. People don't want to go in those buildings. This building they are happy to go in." Indeed, Hundertwasser's projects are incredibly popular. Tourism officials say about a million visitors a year check out the Hundertwasser House in Vienna--even though they aren't allowed inside--making it one of the capital's biggest draws. The popularity of Hundertwasser's buildings, however, cuts two ways. While Rogner and Hundertwasser are pleased with the public interest in Blumau (they say some 100,000 people visited the site before the hotel even opened), they worry about the reaction of the architecture and design worlds, which have traditionally been skeptical of Hundertwasser and his high-profile publicity machine. The biggest concern of nearly everyone involved in the project is that it might be perceived as kitsch or--God forbid--some sort of Austrian Disneyland. "See," hotel director Alfred Hackl says as he leads me on a tour of the hotel grounds, "it's not anything like Disneyland." Bad Blumau is a project with integrity that respects local traditions and fits into the land, he assures me. Hundertwasser himself goes one better, excitedly pointing to pictures of the Blumau project and explaining what the site was like before he and Rogner showed up to build. "In Blumau there were just fields--potatoes. There's definitely more nature now there than there was before," Hundertwasser says. "I'm creating nature and forests and trees where there were none before. I don't put my architecture into a beautiful surrounding. I take an ugly surrounding and create a beautiful environment. That's much more satisfying than destroying nature." Although many of Hundertwasser's motifs at Bad Blumau derive from the vernacular architecture, the hotel bears about as much relation to a Styrian potato field--or the neighboring village--as Tomorrowland does to an Anaheim orange grove. Blumau is a typical Austrian village of relatively uniform half-timbered homes, pubs serving schnitzel and beer, and outlying farms with dilapidated barns, while the hotel is an eccentric amalgam of dazzling white highlighted by bright blues, reds, and yellows, windows of nearly every imaginable shape, size, and style (I lost count at about 40 varieties), tile mosaics, and multicolored ceramic columns. There are all of the hallmarks of classic Hundertwasser planning: an onion dome caps the project, trees and grass sprout from rooftops, hallways meander, the floors are uneven--at least at the edges--and there's barely a straight line or sharp edge in sight. Clearly, the hotel blends into the landscape better than, say, a 10-story tower, or even a four- or five-story glass-and-steel chain hotel. But how much does the design--or indeed Hundertwasser's architectural philosophy--really concern itself with the building's surroundings? Is it really more natural than a potato field? A concrete parking garage now burrows under much of the site, the Safenbach River was rerouted to create a "meditation island" for hotel guests, an enormous pump sends waves crashing down on bathers in one of the pools for 15 minutes of every hour, and a five-foot-tall fence separates the hotel from the surrounding countryside, with guards checking arrivals at the gates. And while Hundertwasser seeks to bring nature back into architecture, his hotel isn't particularly green. Although it's heated by geothermal energy from one of the springs, and some energy is saved by covering the roofs with earth, grass, and trees, no particular effort is made to recycle water, and electricity comes from the Austrian power grid. "People think ecological buildings must have wind generators, solar energy, and hot water systems heated by sun rays. Then they build a house that has all of these things included, but it looks like a factory. These ecological buildings are awful. They are optical pollution," Hundertwasser asserts. "If a so-called ecological building is ugly, then it fails its purpose... optical pollution is the worst of all pollution, and this is not yet evident to the people who want a better environment." Although the hotel may look revolutionary in the context of the village of Blumau, it is in some ways a quintessential expression of Austria's conservative mind-set. Hundertwasser's buildings--and the philosophy underpinning their construction--seem very much an extension of Vienna's long architectural tradition. The decorative touches adorning Hundertwasser's projects are the contemporary equivalent of the work of Vienna's Expressionist masters, the artists who most influence his painting. His objections to the "tyranny of the straight line," his cult of "the natural," his rejection of functionalism and the rigor of academic study of architecture--all these have a deeply conventional appeal, and, in many respects, his architectural tastes are not too far removed from those of Prince Charles. "The architects who hate me accuse me of being populistic, creating kitsch, a kind of Disneyland and garden-dwarf architecture, giving in to the low desires of the people," Hundertwasser says. "But that's silly. Either people are happy with something or they are not happy. There are no low desires of the people in architecture. People just want to live in buildings that let them be and be happy and in harmony with themselves and the environment. So this is what I am providing. It's not taught in any architecture schools." Whatever its architectural merits, Bad Blumau is turning out to be a moneymaker. Rogner's office reports a high occupancy rate, with over-night guests paying between $150 and $200 per night for a double room. And ultimately, that's what it's all about. Rogner is in the hotel business to make money, Blumau needs the tourist schillings, and Hundertwasser--at least in Austria--is a proven crowd pleaser. Busloads of visitors are making their way to Bad Blumau to see the artist's signature tiles, towers, and roof-top trees. As it turns out, the schizophrenic combination of eccentric artist and determined magnate works very nicely. DAVID ROCKS writes about Central Europe from Prague. |
Keywords:
Robert Rogner, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Rogner Bad Blumau,
resort, Vienna, Austria
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