i live in the house with the blue roof

when I think of color in an architectural context I have a strong memory of my childhood neighbor. a girl the same age, living in the same street. i grew up in a small town in Burgenland next to the Hungarian Border. she was my best friend and I wanted to visit her as much as possible. every house looked almost the same. normal houses with gable roof and garden. I was still really young and I often struggled to find her house. So she told me one day: “hey niko, I live in the house with the blue roof.” from then on everything was clear to me and I could find her every time. i spent a lot of time with her and her family. her father was a construction worker. every once in a while I came by, he changed something on their property. he built a new wall. he put a hole in the wall. he put something on the wall or adapted something. he made new windows. or a new fence or a new door. or closed a door again. he made a new pool for the garden. or there was a big BBQ, where he put up a tent for his grill. and so on. this shaped the idea of “building something”. actually a lot of neighbors and people in my hometown just “build stuff”. it was a normal process. there often was no big planning. they just “build stuff”.

contribution and lecture in “Colors”, Diskursiv, Verein für Architekturforschung: Graz, 2023;