Due to our Shipping Reporter rummaging about the tropics, Little Darwin has become aware of the amazing Austrian born artist, architect , radical thinker , writer and environmentalist , Friedrich Stowasser , aka Friedensreich Hundertwasser , 1928-2000.
In a mountain of postcards bought by our waterfront scavenger, he found the above 1972 German art card Exodus into space, by FH .
During his action packed life ,which ended when he dropped dead aboard the Queen Elizabeth ll cruise ship in the Pacific , he designed coins, stamps, flags,posters railed against the massive amount of ticky tacky,look alike accommodation in the world .
He particularly deplored the common use of straight lines in architecture.
Something of a globetrotter-America, Europe , Africa - he exhibited far and wide. He moved to New Zealand in the l970s and lived there for most of the rest of his life. Apart from designing a proposed new flag for New Zealand based on a Maori motif , he also drew up one for Australia in which Uluru held up the world from down under.
On one of his NZ properties he built the Bottle House which had solar power , a waterwheel and a water purification plant. For a bit of variety, he bought the Garden of Eden in Venice.
In l980 , he went to Washington and supported activist Ralph Nader oppose nuclear proliferation.
In 1999 , he designed an extraordinary public toilet block, above, a veritable work of art both outside and within, which put the Kiwi town of Kawakawa on the world tourism map . A glimpse of the tiled interior, which received rave write ups, gives the impression that a lot of fluids of some kind were bottled in Kiwiland.
New Zealand's spectacular Hundertwasser Art Centre, Whangarei , is shown below .
