Susan Buckland: Preserving the cistern chapel

Art and nature should work in harmony, the Austrian artist Frederick Hundertwasser said. But the two appear to have struck a discordant note in Kawakawa. The Northland town's quirky public toilets, designed by Hundertwasser, have become such a prime tourist attraction that the call of nature has been overwhelming the art.

It seems that the cleaners haven't been able to keep pace and Kawakawa's community board has suggested closing them to the public. The community board says preserving them as a work of art and building a new toilet block could be a solution to this art versus nature conundrum.

No way, the Austrian-based Hundertwasser Foundation has protested. Such a move would betray the artist and his legacy. In a letter to the board, the foundation president said Hundertwasser had hoped to draw visitors to the small town with a creation that would not be a sterile and ugly blot on the landscape but a joyful part of it, able to provide "a higher quality of living experience".

The local Hundertwasser fans agree and now the public debate surrounding Kawakawa's mosaic studded structure and organic lavatories has opened the way for a full-time cleaner. Hundertwasser, who died in Kawakawa in 2000, would be "relieved".

During his life the attention-winning artist was regarded by some as the king of kitsch but he attracted a large following in his native land of Austria and here.

I met Hundertwasser during his first visit to New Zealand in the early 70s and wrote about a man who grew grass on rooftops and advocated grazing farm animals on them, a man who expressed a love of nature and impatience with logical, symmetrical buildings.

His languid manner belied a shrewd mind. An environmentalist before it became fashionable to think "green", Hundertwasser was taken with our country and was soon spending several months of each year in the Far North, living in a converted milking shed with a grass roof.

When he died, Kawakawa mourned. The Far North was the artist's adopted home on and off for 30 years and the latest debate surrounding his shrine to the town he loved is not the first.

Several years ago Transit New Zealand shelved plans to straighten Hundertwasser's curved path to the toilet door to help the visually impaired. The local Hundertwasser Trust successfully defended the artist's belief that his buildings should have no straight lines.

I have visited some of Hundertwasser's off-beat buildings in Austria, where they have become tourist magnets, especially for New Zealanders who know of his links with Aotearoa. In Vienna, where he was born in 1928, I found apartments that he had designed with the trademark domes, provocative curves and mosaics.

The KunstHaus Wien, which contains a permanent museum of his works, is another bastion against the predictable. His Hundertwasser House avoids "the usual cliches and norms of academic architecture", likewise the Rogner Bad Blumau hotel, south of Vienna, with its grass-covered roofs and undulating floors. As for his frivolous decoration of Vienna's city administration buildings, Hundertwasser received a $9 million fee, an amount that still strikes many Viennese as obscene.

Hundertwasser, who was named "a living treasure" by the New Zealand Government in 1990, is buried among the thousands of trees, the "ambassadors of nature", he planted on his property near Kawakawa.

Meanwhile, his only public building in the southern hemisphere looks set to continue as a working shrine of sorts. A measure of its appeal is that it has been neither vandalised nor slapped with graffiti. It has also survived a police discovery of cannabis growing on its roof.

It may be that Hundertwasser's aim to draw visitors to Kawakawa with his bright ceramic pillars, gold domes and glass-topped toilets has worked so well that additional facilities will have to be built before long. Hopefully, they won't be too utilitarian. Or as Hundertwasser might have said, "heartless and monotonous slaves to the dictatorship of the straight line".