A couple of days I posted a photo of a building and asked readers to guess what its function was. There were a number of creative ideas including an observatory and a television tower, but Sue was correct in surmising that it is part of a heating plant?

Yes, it actually is a district heating plant in Vienna, Austria. It was designed by Austrian artist Friedensrich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) in 1988-1992. I don’t know too much about the artist, but he was a bit eccentric, judging from the biographical information in Wikipedia, and the name he adopted as a artist means Peace-kingdom Hundred-water.

According to information on a Hundertwasser webpage, originally he opposed the idea of this project, as he had fundamental objections to a garbage-incinerating plant as long as all possibilities for avoiding garbage were not exhausted. But when it was promised that the plant would be equipped with the most modern emission-purification technology, that 60,000 apartments would be heated, and in view of the fact that Vienna needed a garbage-incinerating plant, Hundertwasser finally agreed to do the design.

I’ve included a number of different photos to give you a sense of what the heating plant looks like from different angles and distances. No matter what your views are on modern art, you have to acknowledge that this is a unique and unusual way to decorate the exterior of an urban heating plant.

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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