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