BRAINLESS MASS ANTS

The Mould Manifesto by the painter Hunderwasser is hugely entertaining and inspirational. In his manifesto, he decries the use of straight lines in architecture.  And what painter uses straight lines? Think of almost any painting, and in very few are there straight lines.

So Hunderwasser is onto something here. “We live today in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should take the trouble to count the straight lines all around him…”

If all of the great painters, or let’s say basically all painters, have rejected the straight line, then how can we as architects continue to produce work using nothing but straight lines? How is it that every solution that we produce is basically a series of straight lines?

“The straight line is not a creative, but a reproductive line. In it dwells not so much God and the human spirit as rather the comfort-loving, brainless mass ant.” Let’s not be brainless mass ants.

Hunderwasser goes on to say that straight lines, when left alone, morph and decay into curved lines. This is the increasing entropy argument all over again, of course. Nevertheless, the mold in his Mould Manifesto is basically extolling the virtues of, mold and rust and moss all working to de line the straight line.

He terms this organification of the straight line world as “creative mould.” “It is time industry recognized its fundamental mission, and that is; the production of creative mould!” “Only those technologists and scientists who are capable of living in mould and creatively producing mould will be the master of tomorrow.” Far fetched? Possibly. Yet his theories should give some of us pause. Why do we default to the straight line all the time? Is it because that straight lines are easier to draw? And if so, then why do we always take the easy way out?

We have seen that the drawings that we produce have a direct impact on our buildings. Will a more holistic drawing approach give us the creative freedom and understanding to use less straight lines? Or if we make all of our lines without a straight edge, will it be more likely that our buildings will not have straight lines?

Hunderwasser helps us close out this concept by stating that because the architect uses straight lines, they have no relationship to how the building is actually used because they cannot predict the human activity within. Therefore what we do, in his telling, is nothing more than a rough approximation. His term for this rough approximation was called transautomatism. Just as the painter cannot predict the reactions to the painting, the architect cannot make an analogous assumption.