Yona Friedman: The Latest Architecture and News

At 92 years of age, for his entire career Yona Friedman has occupied an unusual spot within the architecture world; his signature concept, the Ville Spatiale which he first proposed in 1956, combines the top-down megastructural thinking visible in later projects such as Archigram's Plug-In City with a total freedom for occupants to design and build their own homes within the structure. In this installment of his “City of Ideas” column, Vladimir Belogolovsky interviews Friedman at his home in Paris to talk about the Ville Spatiale and his theories of mobile and improvised architecture.

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Best known for his theory of mobile architecture and his spatial city project, Yona Friedman has passed away at 96, as was announced in his Instagram account this morning. The Hungarian born French architect and theorist was one of the most influential figures of the profession in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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Yona Friedman is a French architect and urban planner with more than 92 years of experience that has led him to participate in numerous events, including the Venice Biennial and the Shanghai Biennial. One of his most important works was published in 1958, entitled L'Architecture Mobile, which exposed one of his most ambitious projects named: "La Ville Spatiale", a utopia that recycled mega-structures of existing cities to provide citizens with the chance to live with complete flexibility in their decisions.

French architect Yona Friedman has unveiled his first public project in the United States with The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Miami Design District. Dubbed Space-Chain Phantasy-Miami 2019, the work is sited inside of the Miami Design District's Paradise Plaza. Drawing from a lifetime of developing ideas that empower users and generate democratic cities, Friedman's new prototype is inspired by Miami. The work reflects on Friedman's perspective that architecture should be flexible, mobile, and adjust to the needs of its inhabitants.

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Text from the organizers Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB). The Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), the only exhibition in the world to explore issues of urbanization and architectural development, will be opening for its 7th edition on December 15th, 2017. UABB will be held at Nantou Old Town in Nanshan district, an urban village that was once the administrative center of the Bao'An County. Hou Hanru, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan (in alphabetic order) make up the curatorial team, all known for notable accomplishments in their respective fields. UABB is thrilled to host more than 200 award-winning exhibitors from 25 countries to share their perspectives on diversity and urban villages at this year’s biennale.

People can improvise the city; people can improvise architecture. That means the city shouldn’t resist [its] inhabitants, but obey [its] inhabitants… We need to get back to elasticity.

In this interview from the Louisiana Channel, architect and theorist Yona Friedman discusses the plight of the contemporary city, and how it is the responsibility of architects to design structures that can be inhibited for the widest range of individuals and purposes.

Architect and theorist Yona Friedman has brought his playful “People’s Architecture” installations to Rome’s MAXXI Museum, Paris’s Les Halles and Denmark where they were recently assembled in a workshop at the Danish Association for Architects. Built using plastic hula hoops, each installation is assembled spontaneously, creating new variations of space with each turn. Says Friedman: “Architecture for people proposes a variant of the original “Ville Spatial.” It is based on a structure easy to modify, a structure not necessarily raised over ground level, keeping that option open if wanted.”

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Earlier today, the 17th Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was unveiled with a press preview ahead of its public opening this Friday. With its 13-meter tall "unzipped wall" of square fiberglass tubes, the pavilion is an impressive presence in Hyde park, standing next to the single-story Serpentine Gallery. As described by Bjarke Ingels in his design statement, the pavilion is all about its visual effects from various angles - going from an expansive, transparent rectangle when viewed from the side, and an opaque, curving sculptural shape when seen from either end.

With so much visual intrigue, the project offers plenty to be explored through photography - and accordingly, photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu was there at the opening to investigate the project's visual effects. He also captured the pavilion's neighboring Summer Houses, by Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan. Read on to see the gallery.

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