IN MOST countries the word “incinerator” is synonymous with the horrified reaction of local residents or Nimbys, whose invariable response in every proposed location is Not in my back yard.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Spittellau Thermal Waste Treatment Plant is one of Vienna’s most-visited tourist attractions, as famous for its looks as for its technical prowess.
Those tourists are joined every year by thousands of hapless municipal officials from all over the world, who are sent to Vienna to discover how they can mimic the success of Spittelau and locate an incinerator in a mixed-use city area without causing riots. They haven’t learned the secret yet.
Part of that secret may lie in the fact that Vienna’s city fathers were courageous enough to let one of Austria’s most controversial architects have free rein in the design of the building.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who died in 2000, was a painter and sculptor as well as an architect. His architectural work is comparable to that of Gaudí in its biomorphic forms and use of tile.
When you see the Spittelau incinerator, your first reaction is “wow, what a building” – by which stage you’ve forgotten it’s an incinerator.
Hundertwasser’s style defies description. He was fascinated by spirals, called straight lines “the devil’s tools” and designed undulating floors in his famous Hundertwasserhaus apartment block, also in Vienna, observing that “an uneven floor is a melody to the feet”.
By now you don’t care that Spittelau incinerator is designed to burn 250,000 tons of waste a year, delivered by 250 trucks a day. Of course you don’t. You just want to buy a Hundertwasser T-shirt.
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