Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Born Friedrich Stowasser in 1928, he shed the name for something longer and stranger: Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. He worked as a visual artist and architect who treated standardisation like an enemy, folding nature directly into his building designs and speaking loudly for environmental causes. The Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna — imaginative, vital, utterly unlike its neighbors — became the Austrian capital's most recognisable proof of his vision. In the 1970s he left for New Zealand's Far North, where he spent most of his remaining years until his death in 2000.