Painted buildings

Interesting buildings

A façade painted to look like the church being renovated

City Center

While we werThere was a WC sign so I went to visit the WC.  You had to pay .50 Euro and they locked the door behind you.  You then let yourself out.  It was also the WC of a wine bar and if you had a drink you probably didn’t have to pay.

The Danube Canal

Very narrow here but it other sections they do canal tours on small cruise ships.

The Donaukanal ("Danube Canal") is a former arm of the river Danube, now regulated as a water channel (since 1598), within the city of Vienna, Austria .  It is 17.3 km (10.7 mi) long and, unlike the Danube itself, it borders Vienna’s city centre, Innere Stadt, where the Wien River (Wienfluss) flows into it. [1]

   The Donaukanal bifurcates from the main river at the Nußdorf weir and lock complex, in Döbling, and joins it again just upstream of the "Praterspitz", at the Prater park in Simmering. The island thus formed between the Donaukanal and the Danube holds 2 of the 23 districts of Vienna: Brigittenau (20th District) and Leopoldstadt (2nd District). The canal is crossed by 15 road bridges and 5 train bridges.[1]

     Because in German, the name Kanal, which has been used since about 1700, evokes associations of an open sewer, attempts at renaming the Donaukanal have been made (one suggestion was Kleine Donau—Little Danube) but have not met with success.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaukanal

Lots and lots of graffiti along the canal

I call this photo “Legs.”

These two fellows were photographing some of the graffiti under one of the bridges

But even graffiti has rules ……

"Puber"’s drawings started to show up around Vienna during the last summer, but police failed to catch him despite trying several times. The sprayer, who left his mark mostly around the 7th district, was hated by every resident of Vienna. Even the other sprayers wanted to do nothing with him, because he was aggressive, unpredictable and almost always tried to pick up a fight with them. He never even followed the rules of "graffiti-art", especially the one that says not to spray over the work of other sprayers.”

http://www.austriantimes.at/

and…..

“Austrian police say they have caught an internationally active graffiti artist from the UK together with three pals who now face up to 5 years in jail and a bill for thousands for the clean up work.

According to Austrian police Jack M was also wanted in Prague and Bratislava for similar graffiti vandalism attacks. When he was arrested they recovered numerous specialist spray canisters as well as a high-tech array of equipment including expensive digital cameras used to record the images and smart phones for the transmission.

     The digital images recovered from the electronic equipment included numerous selfies of the group ready for online publication. There were also canisters of pepper spray.

     A police spokesman said: "It was an extremely professional organisation, they even had pass keys arranged that allowed them access to the underground network. This was a professional organisation well equipped for criminal activity."

http://www.austriantimes.at/

“Real Art”…..

We first thought they were just white blobs on the Stubenbrucke bridge

Stubenbrucke  “bridge” over the Danube Canal

Then I happened to turn around to look at them…..

Lemur Heads by Franz West

http://podpoddesign.at/ shows them lit up at night.

Franz West

I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and it could only be described as a time of darkness. Many of the houses and buildings were bombed out, and as children we played in ruins or dirt rather than on the grass. It was more than dirty – filthy. But it was a time of really essential living. A real contrast to the 1960s, when I was in my twenties, and probably more so to the 70s, with children glued to the television in their rooms. We wondered how they would grow up, perhaps what kind of artists they might become: certainly cleaner than my generation.

http://artreview.com/  is a really interesting interview with West from 2007.  West died in July 2012 at the age of 65.

http://www.newyorker.com/  sadly is West’s obituary.

The Hundertwasser Haus

The Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser started out as a painter. Since the early 1950s, however, he increasingly became focused on architecture, writing manifestos and essays and undertaking demonstrations, in which for instance in 1958, he read out loud his ‘Mouldiness Manifesto.’

In 1972, he had his first architectural models made for the Eurovision ‘Wünsch dir was’ show, which he used to visualize his ideas on forested roofs, tree tenants and window rights. In these models he developed new architectural shapes, such as the eye-slit house, the terrace house and the high-rise meadow house.

The WINDOW RIGHT means the freedom for the resident to recreate the prefabricated space of the apartment he is to live in.

This is especially true of the outside wall of his flat. “A person must be allowed to lean out of his window and to paint everything in arm’s reach pink, so people can see from far away, from the street, that there lives a MAN.”

He must also be permitted to let creeping plants grow on the outside walls.

Whether the resident makes use of this window right or not is up to him.

It is then not the government’s, the authorities’ fault if the facades remain rigid in lethally sterile uniformity, and they can wash their hands of it.

http://www.hundertwasser-haus.info/en/

No straight lines outside or within

Each renter has “window rights.”

Shops, cafes and restaurants ring the complex so you can buy Hundertwasser  tchotchkes.  One café sent out a local to round up folks for an explanatory video.  You weren’t obligated to buy a drink, but we did.  The video was actually quite well done and gave you a chance to see the apartment interiors and hear from Hundertwasser.

Dog on the underground train.  Very sweet and came over for me to pat for a bit.  Dogs go just about everywhere but they are all well behaved.

We saw this fellow surfing in the wake of a speed boat on the Danube

DoraMac at the Vienna Marina… the most expensive place to visit with the boat.