i live in the house with the blue roof

i studied architecture at TU Vienna where i taught myself how to take photographs. i see my artistic work as a blend of different interests and disciplines—often but not only operating in the field of architecture. initially, photography was an extension of my architectural practice, a means of enriching my discussion with the environment and my surroundings. later it became its own praxis, which can be treated separately. i mostly shoot on 35mm color film.

today I’m interested in my direct ambience. Sometimes i include personal reference. Sometimes the images function as a note or a reminder. i like non-moving objects and ordinary places. as well as fleeting places and atmosphere, which may be gone soon.

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 roofs and gardens. i was still really young, and i often struggled to find her house. one day she told me: “Hey Niko, i live in the house with the blue roof.” from then on everything was clear to me. i could find her every time.  i spent a lot of time with her and her family. her father was a construction worker. now and again, when i came by, he would have changed something on their property. he’d built a new wall. he’d put a hole in the wall. he’d put something on the wall or adapted something. he’d made new windows. or a new fence or a new door. or bricked up a door again. he’d have made a new pool for the garden. or they hosted a big barbeque, where he’d put up a tent to cover his grill. and so on. this shaped the idea of “building something.” actually, a lot of neighbors and people in my hometown just “built stuff.” It was a normal process. often, there was no big planning process. they just “built stuff.”

later in my life i moved to Vienna and studied architecture. i learned a lot about theory, history, the design process, and the evolution of architecture. it often seemed intensely complicated and hard. you need to have a lot of knowledge and play by the rules. i got the distinct feeling that “building something” is actually very complex and difficult. i mostly forgot about my childhood memories and those first impressions of building architecture as something intuitive and improvised. but, after some years and several visits back home, i started noticing again how much of my hometown was built by neighbors and anonymous people. i noticed the quality and beauty of those buildings, the lightness in the process, and the difference in their makeshift approach.

i started to take a lot of pictures, trying to capture all the details. for example, thinking about material and approach: maybe you use three different types of bricks because it’s what you already have at home. or take the execution of common architectural elements such as walls, windows, doors, and gutters. they differ in form and shape. the patina. the function and use of the building or structure often plays a certain role, but the design seems pretty intuitive. i found a lot of simple structures that were of great interest. they were built with great skill and accuracy. piles of useful materials were organized in a beautiful manner. i try to look at these places from different angles. to reduce and enlarge the scale. to zoom in and out. to pay attention to small details. to sharpen the focus through abstraction. Ii has become a part of my everyday praxis. my routine.

even when i’m on holiday i am guided by those places. I visited the seaside in the north of France. i discovered some beach houses that you can rent for the day. every house looked almost identical. i took some pictures of the site. i thought of my neighbor friend. i thought about people just “building something.” i thought about “the house with the blue roof.”

lecture in “Colors”, Diskursiv, Verein für Architekturforschung: Graz, Forum Stadtpark, Stadtpark 1, 2023;
contribution in the publication “Colors”, Diskursiv, Verein für Architekturforschung, Jovis Verlag: Berlin, 2024;