Waldspirale on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The Waldspirale is a residential building complex in Darmstadt,
The Waldspirale is a residential building complex in Darmstadt, Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, built in the 1990s. The name translates into English as forest spiral, reflecting both the general plan of the building and the fact that it has a green roof
A green roof or living roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. It may also include additional layers such as a root barrier and drainage ...
. It was designed by Austrian
Austrian may refer to:
* Austrians, someone from Austria or of Austrian descent
** Someone who is considered an Austrian citizen, see Austrian nationality law
* Austrian German dialect
* Something associated with the country Austria, for example: ...
artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Friedrich Stowasser (15 December 1928 – 19 February 2000), better known by his pseudonym Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (), was an Austrian visual artist and architect who also worked in the field of environmental protection ...
, planned and implemented by architect Heinz M. Springmann, and constructed by the Bauverein Darmstadt company. The building was completed in 2000.
Description
The Waldspirale apartment building is located in Darmstadt's Bürgerparkviertel. It contains 105 apartments and a parking garage. In the past, the topmost part of the building has had restaurants, cafes and bars for people to visit. Currently, there are no open amenities for visitors. 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 aregular grid
A regular grid is a tessellation of ''n''-dimensional Euclidean space by congruent parallelotopes (e.g. bricks).
Its opposite is irregular grid.
Grids of this type appear on graph paper and may be used in finite element analysis, finite vol ...
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.
Design
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"''Pgs. 240–241, Karsten Harries, ''The Ethical Function of Architecture'' MIT Press, 1997. or "against the straight line." For cost reasons, only a few of the apartments' interiors were designed individually. From the outside, the typical elements of Hundertwasser's personal style attract attention: the gildedonion dome
An onion dome is a dome whose shape resembles an onion. Such domes are often larger in diameter than the tholobate upon which they sit, and their height usually exceeds their width. These bulbous structures taper smoothly to a point.
It is a typ ...
s, the absence of straight lines and sharp corners, the multicoloured painting of the building in earth tones and the colourful ceramic columns.
References
External links
* http://www.oekosiedlungen.de/waldspirale/ – photo gallery and short description (in German) {{coord, 49, 53, 8, N, 8, 39, 21, E, type:landmark, display=title Residential buildings completed in the 20th century Buildings and structures in Darmstadt Houses in Germany Visionary environments