Inspiration, modesty, sustainability. Yona Friedman, visionary and innovative architecture theorist, is the author of an installation for Material ConneXion Italia and Conai created at Superstudio Più, in Via Tortona, Milan, as part of the 2018 fuorisalone.
Architect, urban planner, theorist, Hungarian-born naturalised French citizen, Yona Friedman is 95 years old today. We met him on the occasion of the installation 'Meubles plus' that he created at the invitation of Material ConneXion Italia for CONAI – the National Packaging Consortium – and packaging waste recycling consortia at Superstudio, within the framework of the exhibition Smart City: Materials, Technology and People.
Yona Friedman became famous at the end of the 1950s for his strongly innovative visionary theories: the Manifesto of Mobile Architecture and the theory of megastructures. Grounded in a sharp political and social critique of the capitalist system, they envisaged the creation of small-scale groups and communities to generate housing projects autonomously, capable of being transformed over time in line with changing needs and urban development through the self-planning of urban villages rather than megalopolises.
A prolific author of many books, among them the widely known 'Utopies réalisables' of 1974, at the end of the 1970s Friedman produced some twenty architecture manuals of extreme visual and didactic simplicity for self-building in developing countries, applied with success in India: thanks to the United Nations, posters were produced to be put up on walls in villages, disseminating basic instructions for building one's own home and improving one's living conditions.
You have been regarded as a visionary architect, but do you believe that your utopia is achievable today, thanks to new technologies?
The difficulty of architecture is technique. The idea behind megastructures is to transform a house into a kind of mobile, combinable furniture. In this way, everything can be arranged as one wishes, and if one wants to change something, one can. For example, it would make sense for a house to be able to take on a different configuration depending on changing climate conditions.
To achieve this kind of mobile architecture, a problem arises that I already addressed in the 1950s: infrastructures. Infrastructures can be electrical networks, telephone networks, water networks, or all kinds of distribution networks, but all of this has become achievable over the last 20 years thanks to technology. To create a telephone network, there is today a network of satellites working to make the phone in our pocket function, and in the same way we can use solar energy to light our streets thanks to a network of solar panels.
I call it 'cloud infrastructure', or 'immaterial infrastructure'. It exists for the telephone, it exists for electricity, and so on.
The general concept of the city is changing; the city is the condensation that allows me to work here, but thanks to technology it is now possible to work miles away from home. This condensation is not necessary, yet all technological traffic derives from it, and today it allows us to be interconnected and to have social contacts.
You are a multifaceted figure: theorist, architect, urban planner and also artist. Which definition do you prefer?
I consider myself a simple human animal. All my actions stem from fears related to art, architecture and science, and they are artificial fears. As you know, architecture has a deeper meaning than simply 'building'. I think of myself as a member of a species, endowed with a genetic capacity. Everything is connected, and if a small part of DNA is modified, the effects will be felt everywhere.
So yours is a humanistic point of view?
Certainly, this is my animal side, my vision of being human. This is my characteristic. As you know, what we call civilisation began when we started to design great technological and non-technological innovations, starting from a door, which can be either open or closed, all the way to a computer, which is essentially a sequence of doors. The characteristic of the human race is the ability to imagine the various possibilities that all the different existing materials can offer, a trait that turns out to be truly important.
Are there projects you would have liked to carry out during your life, but that you never had the opportunity to realise?
The best expression for all of this is everyday life, so I can say that my real project is to live tomorrow, and I repeat this project every day!
What is the idea behind the installation for Material ConneXion Italia at Superstudio Più, at this 2018 fuorisalone?
It is the transformation of what in the 1950s I called mobile architecture. This is a variation of it, a converting of architecture into furniture. In other words, it is about building a room that can be moved. Over the last 20 years I have been realising this kind of project at a very low cost, which means that people can reproduce this idea using very simple techniques. This is the opportunity to develop popular architectures. Design is an elitist idea, but what truly matters is popular design – that is, a design that everyone can create on their own. I believe it is a necessary path.
So can everyone become an architect?
The answer is really simple. Everyone can take photographs with their own smartphone, yet photographers continue to exist as both a popular and a specialised activity. The same applies to music: many people can make music, but only some can be considered artists. Architects too have the possibility of being specialists.
Your architecture manuals fit within the great Western tradition of architectural treatises begun by Vitruvius, yet they are the only ones addressed to the poor, with essential drawings and words that are comprehensible to everyone. What is the underlying idea?
We are visual animals and we think in images. So I thought of drawing these images in the simplest and most elementary way possible, so that they would be easy for everyone to understand. Explaining architecture and the basic principles of construction clearly, precisely and simply, even to those who cannot read. I have used this system very often in India. I was commissioned by the United Nations to use this method in order to test whether it worked. It worked, and it still works now. Simplicity is important. Simplicity is the most complicated thing.