At 94, Yona Friedman May Be the Boldest Architect Alive: His Designs Have No "Walls" at All

Yona Friedman offers a way of thinking, and that is worth more than any space you could actually live in.

Yona Friedman, the 94-year-old French architect, has finished only two buildings in a career of more than 70 years. Most of that time he has lived on paper.

Plenty of architects have taken inspiration from those papers, among them the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Japanese architects Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa.

Koolhaas is a Pritzker Prize laureate; the other two were leading members of Japan's Metabolism movement. Metabolism, a group founded by the noted Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, held that architecture should be seen through the lens of natural evolution rather than as a fixed, immovable material asset — a dynamic view that was, in effect, an offshoot of Yona's theory of "mobile architecture."

In more than 40 books and hundreds of papers that ordinary readers would never pick up, Yona was thinking about a future that belonged to each individual.

From any angle, this plan for the future was audacious: buildings that could change shape and move at will, packed into a basic three-dimensional grid frame, held up by stair towers 60 meters apart, stretching on and on through the air.

Every element of "mobile architecture" — wall, roof, ceiling — became, in a sense, a piece of furniture, and residents were free to move it or swap it out. The only fixed parts were the basic frame: columns, beams, infrastructure, power, water, communication networks.

The "city in the sky" built this way had no "facade." It was made of a series of "interior urban spaces" — the empty gaps between the dwellings, and above and below them. The city's face could change at any moment, and public space was no longer merely a "corridor" between buildings.

Inside this "long-span" structure, people could use the space between the stair towers as they liked, for walking, for driving, for leisure, and could even plant greenery in it.

What decided the look of the buildings and of the city was no longer the government or the developers, but every resident of it.

The idea of "mobile architecture" was first put forward at the 10th Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1956, and, unexpectedly, quite a few of the architects there took it up.

In the 1950s, with postwar urbanization speeding up and the world's population still climbing, this kind of architecture — which hoped to give people in a society that was no longer uniform the right to express themselves freely — was idealistic, but it had a practical side too.

For Yona, a Hungarian Jew who had been persecuted by the Nazis and driven from his homeland, building "mobile architecture" meant remaking order: "I realized that no tradition is safe, that a person's behavior is bound to change over time, and that architecture is part of that behavior."

He began to imagine the details of "mobile architecture."

Walls that could change shape easily were the simplest part. Borrowing from the "prefabricated component" technology that emerged in the 1940s, Yona devised a set of folding panels joined by hinges and boards, which he named the "folding screen."

The roof or ceiling covering the "folding screen" was harder to standardize. So he set aside the shape of each individual part and sketched a geometric skeleton that could hold the "folding screens." Residents could build their own houses on a series of "beams," forming "raft-like blocks" that "floated" in mid-air.

The furnishings inside would change too. Fixed bathroom fittings would join the water network through flexible plastic hoses, so they could swivel around the main drainpipe and be shifted from one spot to another. Yona called such infrastructure "furniture-like," because it would no longer be fixed to one place in a room but could be moved about as freely as a chair.

He sketched his ideas on paper and built a good many models. Reality met that enthusiasm coldly.

The governments and developers who paid for new buildings did not lack the time or the energy to explore the new technology that "mobile architecture" would need. They simply had no interest in what Yona cared about: whether poor people could survive.

When he was put in charge of developing his first social housing project, Yona's "humanitarian concern" ran into trouble. By the standards of that time and place, the houses built for the poor were already an innovation, yet the authorities flatly refused to give the residents the slightest say. Power stayed in the hands of government officials, who were not going to live there. When a minister inspecting the project said he wanted a window cut into one corner of a house, the contractor immediately ordered the wall broken open and the window installed exactly as the minister wished.

Unable to compromise with the mainstream, Yona got only two chances to build what he had imagined.

The David d'Angers high school in Angers, France, is fixed to the ground, but the process of building it was democratic: Yona invited all 1,500 students and teachers to take part in the discussion, and with the talks with parents and the government added in, planning took four full years. Worried that the lives and study habits of future students would change, he also left plenty of gaps in the building to allow for later alterations. The school does look different today, and its website has published details of the renovation.

Closer to what Yona had in mind was the Museum of Simple Technology in Madras, India. It was extremely plain — a lattice dome of bamboo strips trimmed with woven bamboo panels and covered in the sort of aluminum foil used to wrap food, at a cost of $2 per square meter. It served local people who had never been to school. The outside of every structure was covered with comic strips on subjects such as how to find water, build a roof, grow mushrooms and save energy, meant to help these poor communities build survival skills.

The building process was unconventional too. Instead of architectural drawings, Yona handed local builders a "workbook" drawn as a comic strip, and with it they put the structure up.

"My work isn't focused on stating 'what I can do,' but on proving 'that anyone can do it.'" He brought this project up again and again in interviews, because it showed, to a degree, that the "mobile architecture" project was feasible — that ordinary people with no background in architecture could, after the necessary training, conceive, design and build their own houses.

When there were no houses to build, Yona concentrated on drawing "instruction manuals" of every kind, setting out his ideas in comic strips. Because they were easy to follow and fun to read, UNESCO, the Council of Europe and France's Ministry of the Environment, among others, asked him to make manuals on other subjects for citizens with little schooling.

His ideas grew bolder.

Beyond the partition-chain structure of the "folding screen," he sketched a spatially far more complicated protein-chain structure; a Merzbau structure inspired by the studio of that name the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters built for himself; and a crumpled-paper structure that looked like folded terrain. The point was freer architectural expression.

He built models of the protein-chain structure out of loops of wire. As he imagined it, all construction could take place within a few sets of ring structures: you could draw a regular polygon on each ring, with each ring standing for one face of a regular polyhedron, and a set of rings of the same diameter would form the frame of a regular polyhedron. Any regular polyhedron — whether its face was an equilateral triangle, a square or a regular pentagon — could be joined to another as long as the rings at the joining faces had the same diameter, and the spatial frame that resulted would be as shapeless as a protein.

To help people design their own homes more freely, he even tried to build a device called a "dwelling writer" (it never worked). You could choose the shape of each room, place the kitchen, the bathroom and other functional zones in the space, and slot changeable parts — walls, partitions, floors, ceilings — into a structure already fitted with drainage, power and communication networks, then preview the look and the cost of different spaces once the design was done.

For the "city in the sky" made up of "mobile architecture," Yona also thought through a careful set of building rules and operating methods.

On each "floor plate," for instance, 30 percent of the area would be kept for gardens, and every floor slab would need perforations to form courtyards and light wells, so that the plants got enough sun and residents on the lower floors could see the sky.

Or again: the three-dimensional framework of the "city in the sky" could be paid for by the city and the state, and future residents would lease these "floor plates" and build their own homes on top of them. When a resident planned to move out of a "floor dwelling," most of the money they had put into the structure should be returned, and the old dwelling would be "inherited" by the city or the state.

He drew many templates for the "city in the sky," but said none of the sketches was meant to express an aesthetic settled in advance. They were meant to convey a sense of possibility, and a disorder that moves you.

"Disorder is itself a kind of order," Yona concluded.

All of it goes back to something he noticed in primary school.

He set the observation down in detail in his book In Defense of Home (《为家园辩护》): "A house standing on its own does not exist. A house does not end at the outer edge of its floor; it goes on toward the street, the garden, and then to the other side of the street. Having crossed the street, the house continues, entering and passing through everything in front of it, again and again, extending, and extending further…"

"To imagine a house is to imagine the whole world," Yona concluded.

Pressing that conclusion further, he arrived at a new one —

"Everyone imagines their own house. So everyone is imagining their own world. Every house imagined by the person who lives in it will be different, and so every imagined world will be different too. A house, or a world, therefore has no need to look like anyone else's."

In the end these conclusions led to the question he spent his life on: how to build the house its occupant imagines, one that can be adjusted to the occupant's changing thoughts and tastes from day to day, and that finally meets the individual's own demands of architecture.

Apart from those two compromised projects, a pile of papers and a stack of models, Yona's own practice of "mobile architecture" went no further.

Compared with an architecture world held in check by money and power, the art world welcomed him more warmly.

The protein-chain structure described above turned up again in his art project, the "Museum in the Street." Once more he carried his idea of freedom into it: "Must display cases be shown inside the closed interior of a museum? They should be everywhere — on the street, in gardens — they need no special protection."

In each city, Yona would build this museum by working with local people and using different materials. Its shape could be assembled and changed at will, and different contents, all of it supplied by the public, could be slotted into the structure. Anyone passing was free to look at and experience the exhibits whenever they liked, and free to add things of their own.

Some added their own photographs and drawings; others pushed in phones with shattered screens. Behind every object was a personal story.

Before this year's Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, the "Museum in the Street" had already come to Shanghai once, in 2015. That year the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai staged a solo show of Yona's work, "Utopia Achievable — Yona Friedman."

During the same run, another PSA gallery was showing Piece by Piece (《渐渐件件》), by the well-known Italian architect Renzo Piano. The museum's director, Gong Yan, said this was "deliberate."

Gong Yan hoped the contrast between the two would "show a kind of diversity," presenting different architects' "different attitudes toward the same thing." She explained it in an interview with The Bund (《外滩画报》): "As a representative figure of Milanese modernism, Renzo also carries on the idea Le Corbusier championed — that architecture can change the way people live, and that the architect can take on the role of creator. Yona did not. He criticized that view entirely from the position of an experimenter."

At the 1970 competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Yona and Renzo Piano crossed paths briefly. Piano won.

The cultural building we see today, its skeleton exposed and its exterior covered in pipes and machinery, once ran so counter to Paris's traditional architecture that many Parisians could not accept it.

Set beside Yona's proposal, though, it is plainly "conservative." What Yona wanted to build was a cultural pavilion with no facade at all, one whose appearance would shift with the shape of the exhibitions inside, so that the whole building stayed permanently unstable.

In 1998, Renzo Piano won the Pritzker Prize. Yona is still filed under "utopian architects."

He reads the word "utopia" his own way: "A thing is called a utopia because some people think it cannot be done. Once everyone agrees it can be done, it stops being a utopia."

He does not think his own vision is impossible, because part of that future has already reached him. In the 1960s he imagined several of the earth's continents joined together, with a new kind of intercontinental city born from the link. In the 1980s Japan's Seto Ohashi Bridge was finished, tying Honshu to Shikoku. In the 1990s the Channel Tunnel opened, connecting Britain with the European mainland. And even without roads or bridges, ever-faster aircraft had already turned the idea into fact.

Technology, perhaps, will never be the obstacle. What "mobile architecture" really needs is a society able to make room for the individual, and therefore able to change freely, to "move."

"My era may not have arrived yet," Yona explained, knowing he does not have much time left.

But when will that future come? No one has an answer.

Cover image from archdaily; images in the article, unless otherwise noted, are from archdaily and yonafriedman.