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.”
