Hundertwasser

  Friedensreich Hundertwasser was a Viennese artist and architect.  He's quite famous here, and he designed several buildings in Vienna.  One day Keewi and I decided to do a little Hunderwasser tour.  It was started by seeing the power plant he designed at Spittelau, near where I am living in Vienna:

  Not the most beautiful building in the world, but for a power plant, it ain't bad.  I showed Keewi that because we happened to be going by it anyhow, en route to somewhere else, but she liked it a lot, and so we went to see his other local buildings.  First is the Hundertwasser Museum, KunstHausWien:

  It has a cafe and bathrooms that are all Hunderwasser-ified as well.  And you can kind of see one of his signature elements: organically uneven floors ("an uneven floor is a divine melody to the feet").  Quite playful and fun.  Then on to Hundertwasserhaus, an apartment building:

  That was a bit depressing.  In contrast to the museum, the HundertwasserHaus was badly in needing of fresh paint and maintenance, and appeared to be run for maximal gouging of tourists (courtesy of the gift shop across the street, also designed by Hundertwasser), with no respect for the actual value of the building.  As I understand it, it was constructed as affordable public housing, and Hundertwasser designed it for free to, as he said, prevent something ugly from being built instead.  Sadly, I'm not sure he succeeded, despite his noble efforts.

  But that isn't his fault, and I still like his architecture.  Often compared to Gaudi, for obvious reasons, but quite different and unique.  I'd enjoy going to see some of his other buildings, most of which are in Austria and Germany, but there are exceptions, such as a winery in Napa that I don't think I ever visited!

  I also saw some paintings by Hundertwasser at a small museum that I went to several weeks later, but you won't get to see photos of those.  They were immediately obvious as works by him, even though I had only seen his buildings before then, never his paintings, which is kind of interesting.  The aesthetics transcend the medium, I guess.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum

  One of the things we did while bopping around Vienna after Christmas was to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the city's main museum of fine arts.  It was absolutely wonderful; we spent pretty much a full day in it, and were quite tired and sated by the end!  Minimal commentary here, mostly I'll just show you a bunch of photos I took with Keewi's camera.  (By the way, I make a note of which camera I'm using mostly for my own benefit, because I'm curious to see how our two very different cameras perform under different circumstances; hers is a Canon Digital Elph, a small point-and-shoot, mine is a Panasonic/Leica "SLR-like" type).

  Starting off with ancient (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, ...) art, of which they have an enormous collection:

  The bust is of Aristotle.  The building itself is amazing too, by the way:

  OK, now onward to somewhat more modern times:

  They have some neat suits of armor, as you can see.  Keewi wanted to be in the photo with the unicorn.  The spherical reflection painting is obviously reminiscent of Escher's famous drawing, but centuries earlier!  In one of the photos you can see a fellow painting a reproduction of one of the paintings on the wall; it was stunningly good, virtually indistinguishable from the original.  I spent a long time glancing back and forth between them, trying to find any difference!

  Out into the atrium for a breather:

  And then we plunge into the other wing:

  This wing didn't do as much for me as the other wing.  Many of the paintings were very dark, in need of restoration I think.  Many were also religious paintings of this saint or that, this biblical event or that, which I find quite boring.

  And that's your museum tour for the day.

Bopping around Vienna

The next couple of days we just walked around Vienna seeing the sights:

  From the top, that's the Rathaus (on an unusually gorgeous day!), Parliament with the Rathaus behind, an enormous Wiener schnitzel at Figlmüller, the Belvedere and gardens, back to the Rathaus for the Christmas market there, Parliament and the Rathaus at night, and some detail on the Parliament.  We did go into the Belvedere itself and looked at art all day, but I didn't carry my camera these days; these are all on Keewi's camera.

  We also we out to dinner at a Korean restaurant with some old friends who some of you may recognize:

  It was a bit of a strange Korean restaurant (no bibimbap on the menu!), but very fun!