Rewilding the Vertical: On Hundertwasser, Blade Runner, and the Imaginary Life of Space

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The first time I saw one of Hundertwasser’s skyscrapers, it was on the cover of Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. I didn’t yet know who Hundertwasser was, or even what to make of the image itself. But it stopped me. Something in the wild verticality, the riotous color, the refusal of symmetry—it struck me with the quiet authority of recognition. This, somehow, was the city I both wanted and already knew.

At the time, I was living in Los Angeles and writing my undergraduate thesis—a performative immersion into the city as science fiction. I wasn’t just studying LA. I was being shaped by it. I came to see it not as a static environment but as a collapsing prism of architecture, media, information, and class—where spatial narratives bled into lived experience. Science fiction, in that context, wasn’t speculative. It was diagnostic. It made visible the dystopian logics already present: economic inequality, de facto racial segregation, and spatialized violence. And it revealed how the imaginary wasn’t something overlaid on the city—it was the city, just beneath the surface.

Hundertwasser’s painted tower on that book cover wasn’t escapist fantasy. It was amplification. A strange beacon of spatial possibility, it rendered the urban vertical not as domination, but as growth—chaotic, joyful, irreverent. What I would later come to understand through Soja’s spatial theory—particularly his elaboration of thirdspace—I had already felt in that image. That urban space is always a negotiation between the material, the conceptual, and the lived. That space is not a container but a force. And that the imaginary doesn’t supplement reality—it co-produces it.

This, in Soja’s terms, was thirdspace—not just the physical or conceptual dimensions of the city, but its lived space, where reality is always in tension with representation, and where the imaginary is not an overlay but a constitutive force. Building on Lefebvre’s spatial trialectic, Soja offered a way to think the city beyond binaries: not as a clash between real and imagined, but as a zone in which the two are always already entwined. Hundertwasser’s work doesn’t illustrate this—it enacts it.

Hundertwasser’s skyscraper paintings perform a speculative urbanism in which the built environment is freed from the logics of control and repetition. The towers bloom upward in impossible configurations—no two windows alike, no story the same. The perspective is unstable, the palette aggressive in its joy, and the sense of elevation feels less architectural than vegetal: as if the city had grown itself, shedding the disciplines of modernist order for the erratic exuberance of life.

This vision isn’t limited to canvas. In works like Architectural Manifestation over Photograph (above, c. 1970s), Hundertwasser overlays a black-and-white image of regimented postwar high-rises with swirling, organic forms—trees erupting from rooftops, biomorphic voids puncturing the grid. The result is a kind of visual insurgency: not erasure, but eruption. Color invades concrete. Imagination invades infrastructure. It’s both critique and proposal, a refusal of sterile geometries and an insistence that the city must dream otherwise.

What emerges across these works is an urban imaginary that both reflects and transforms the conditions of post-industrial space. These are not just buildings—they are vertical ecologies, dreamt from the ruins of industrial logic. Even the skyscraper, long a symbol of capitalist ambition and spatial hierarchy, is here turned inside out. It remains tall, yes—but it is no longer straight. Its ascent is not linear, but ludic. It winds, bends, breaks the frame. The vertical becomes a symbol not of dominance, but of refusal—a way of rewilding the city from within its very form.

And yet, for all their play, these images don’t escape the contradictions of capital—they aestheticize them. The ecstatic surface of the painting is not an evasion but a confrontation. It holds contradiction without flattening it. The economic inequities and spatial violences that define modern cities are not erased; rather, they’re absorbed and transfigured. In this way, Hundertwasser’s work mirrors the structure of the postmodern city itself: beautiful, broken, plural, unresolved.

It’s worth asking whether the organicism in Hundertwasser’s work fully escapes the grip of the system it resists. The flowing lines, the biomorphic curves, the rooftop forests—these aesthetic strategies challenge the rationalization of space, but they also risk becoming a parody of life under capitalism’s ever-deepening reach. Foucault’s theory of biopower reminds us that modernity’s power doesn’t just repress; it regulates, nourishes, optimizes. It manages life itself. In this light, Hundertwasser’s “natural” buildings can be read not only as resistance, but as deeply entangled with the very logics of life-management they seem to subvert. Their eccentricity might offer a kind of therapeutic simulation of freedom—personalized, decorative, even marketable. But at their best, they don’t deny this tension. They aestheticize it. They stage the contradiction: between ecology and control, between expression and regulation, between the vitality of the organic and its appropriation as lifestyle branding. The forms refuse to resolve this tension, and in doing so, they remain provocations—not solutions, but strange mirrors of the world we live in.

This refusal to resolve is where the work gains its ethical force. Unlike modernist blueprints that aim for legibility and control, Hundertwasser’s skyscrapers refuse to discipline space. They celebrate the collapse of control, not as chaos, but as possibility. This is where the “childlike” aesthetic becomes philosophically vital. It is not naive, but courageous—a reclamation of imagination as an epistemic mode. It invites us to play not in denial of complexity, but in its name.

And then—he builds them.

In the Kuchlbauer Tower, Hundertwasser brings the painting into the world. But rather than solidify or resolve the dream, the building becomes another act of performance. It twists upward in impossible shapes, adorned with domes, spiral walkways, uneven windows, and bursts of unexpected gold. It refuses the gravity of institutional architecture, replacing it with a performative logic of wonder. Every curve seems to laugh at zoning laws. Every surface insists that form is never neutral.

Here, the real and the imaginary do not collapse into simulation. They cohabit. The tower is not a metaphor for utopia—it is a claim that utopia is always partial, always material, always already underway. It exists not as a destination but as an orientation: toward plurality, toward affect, toward spatial forms that refuse closure.

Hundertwasser’s built and painted environments both ask us to reimagine space not as something to be solved, but as something to be lived with—messy, recursive, mediated, and, above all, imagined.

But there’s a more literal nod to Hundertwasser in Blade Runner, one that quietly embeds his presence into the fictional geography of the film: the address of the character Leon Kowalski is listed as 1187 Hunterwasser Street. The name is a slightly altered spelling, but the homage is unmistakable. In a city where streets are usually named after industrialists, developers, or presidents, this gesture is poetic. It slips into the background, almost unnoticeable—but once seen, it resonates.

The irony here is rich. Blade Runner is, visually and thematically, everything Hundertwasser opposed: angular, technocratic, vertical in its hierarchies and logics of control. Its urban future is one of regulated life and privatized sky. And yet, into this claustrophobic world, the filmmakers smuggle a name that whispers otherwise. It’s a moment of counter-imaginary—a quiet subversion buried in the geometry of dystopia.

We never see anything resembling a Hundertwasser building on Hunterwasser Street. Leon’s apartment is cold, dim, forgettable. But the name lingers, pointing to a kind of spatial imaginary the film itself cannot realize. It stages the dissonance between two futures: one mechanized, the other organic. One defined by control, the other by playful refusal.

Hundertwasser’s presence here doesn’t resolve anything. It doesn’t fix the city. But it does rupture the seamlessness of the world. It reminds us that even the most totalizing visions of the future contain their leaks, their interruptions, their ghosted possibilities. A street name that resists the city it belongs to.

And maybe that’s the whole point. That the urban imaginary, even in its darkest iterations, always harbors a crack. A sliver of eccentricity. A misnamed street. A momentary architecture of what if.

Hundertwasser’s philosophies—his insistence on the rejection of the straight line, his belief in the individual’s right to aesthetic self-expression, his integration of nature and architecture—stand in stark contrast to the oppressive, industrial verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. By giving a replicant a home on “Hunterwasser Street,” the film draws attention, perhaps inadvertently, to the tension between artificiality and organic life. It plants, in the heart of the dystopia, a seed of another possible urbanism.

It’s a poignant irony. Leon’s apartment is dark, crumbling, suffocating—barely habitable. And yet the address points elsewhere, toward an imagination of space that resists precisely this kind of compression. It’s as if the film knows what it cannot offer: transcendence, warmth, breath. And so it gestures—fleetingly, almost privately—toward the name of someone who could have built a different city altogether.

And yet, despite the philosophical dissonance between Blade Runner's dystopia and Hundertwasser’s ecological humanism, there’s an uncanny resonance between them. Both offer visions of the urban that are overwhelmingly aestheticized, drenched in surface and contradiction, refusing neutrality. Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles is bathed in neon fog and rain-slick reflections, a hyperreal montage of East Asian signage, retro-futurist decay, and vertical gothic noir. It is a city of juxtapositions—technological and ancient, brutalist and baroque, utterly synthetic yet strangely organic.

In this sense, Scott’s world mirrors what Hundertwasser achieves in paint: a collapse of binary order. Blade Runner may traffic in control—policed streets, surveillance infrastructures, corporate verticality—but its aesthetic bleeds. It celebrates excess, layering, sensory overload. Like Hundertwasser’s towers, it constructs a visual ecology in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the natural and the artificial, dissolve into affect. Buildings glow. Language fractures. Neon drips like paint.

The iconic image of the spinner cruising past the glowing visage of the geisha—her face stretched across the surface of a megastructure—encapsulates this collapse. This isn’t just an advertisement. It’s a building-as-screen, a spectacle so large it overrides the function of architecture entirely. The skyscraper becomes a dream-surface, a vector of memory, desire, cultural displacement. The vertical city becomes cinematic—not just in aesthetic, but in epistemology. Its surfaces are no longer structural; they are psychological.

This is where the comparison to Hundertwasser deepens. His towers too resist structuralism—not by turning architecture into cinema, but by turning it into painting. Color, curvature, asymmetry, visual noise. Where Scott builds a haunted monument to post-industrial alienation, Hundertwasser constructs an exuberant affirmation of the same entropic forces. Both engage the collapse of modernist order. The difference is tonal. Blade Runner mourns the loss. Hundertwasser plays in it. But the logic is shared: the world as too much, the surface as depth, the city as affective spectacle.

This is not to say Blade Runner is secretly utopian. It isn’t. But it does suggest that dystopia, too, can be a site of aesthetic longing—a terrain where we project not just fear but desire. A hunger for beauty, for sensual density, for life. And perhaps this is where the Hundertwasser reference—explicit in the address “1187 Hunterwasser Street,” implicit in the stylized disorder of space—really lands: not as corrective, but as echo. A ghostly reminder that even in collapse, we reach for the organic. For light. For texture. For the crooked, impossible city that breathes. Because in the end, what both Blade Runner and Hundertwasser render visible is this: the surface is never just surface. It is memory, fantasy, history, and hope—folded into form.

Perhaps that’s what the city gives us in its best moments: not certainty, not resolution, but the possibility of otherwise. A brief encounter, a crooked corner, a burst of color where it shouldn’t be. A street name in a dystopian film that points, however faintly, toward the right to reimagine space.

And beyond critique or theory, what lingers in Hundertwasser’s skyscrapers is something harder to name: a sense of transcendence. Not the monumental kind. Not the utopia of master plans. But something quieter. Momentary. A flash—like Robert Frost’s pragmatic glimpse in For Once, Then, Something—a fleeting intimation that there is something, just out of reach, shimmering at the bottom of the well. A sense that, in certain configurations—of light, form, color, proximity—urban space can open outward, not as escape, but as expansion.

Not the transcendence of salvation, or of escape into the sublime. But something both more intimate and more infrastructural: the sudden, strange feeling of being immersed in something larger than oneself—something shared, connective, animated by beauty and contradiction. Hundertwasser’s buildings make space for that feeling. They don’t promise it, but they permit it.

It doesn’t last. It isn’t meant to. But it marks. It leaves a trace. Like walking through a curved corridor and feeling, for just a moment, that the world could be otherwise. That order could be softened. That the vertical could mean growth instead of domination. That the shared could still feel personal, and the aesthetic could still feel political.

In this way, Hundertwasser’s urbanism is both socialist and spiritual. It seeks not to dominate space but to share it—to let it breathe, to make room for difference, for encounter, for joy. And in doing so, it quietly transforms the imaginary from a tool of escape into a practice of presence. Not a blueprint, not a doctrine, but a way of being with space—and with each other.

Maybe that’s the gift of these towers, these painted architectures, these performative provocations. They don’t offer a way out. They offer a way in—to the messy, plural, mediated urban real, lit briefly by the possibility of something more.

Footnote:

In “For Once, Then, Something,”Frost reflects on staring into a well—searching for something more than reflection or surface. The final lines offer a vision of fleeting, incomplete transcendence:

“…For once, then, something.”

It’s not a vision of certainty, but of a momentary glimmer—a brief, refracted perception of something real, half-glimpsed, half-imagined. Like Hundertwasser’s architecture, it offers not escape, but an opening: quiet, provisional, and unforgettable.