Yona Friedman
| Yona Friedman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 5, 1923 Budapest, Hungary |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Architect |
Yona Friedman (born 5 June 1923, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born French architect, urban planner and designer. He was influential in the late 1950s and early 1960s, best known for his theory of mobile architecture.
Yona Friedman has been through the Second World War escaping the Nazi roundups and lived for about a decade in the city of Haifa in Israel before moving permanently to Paris in 1957. He became a French citizen in 1966.
In 1956, the X International Congress of Modern Architecture in Dubrovnik, his "Manifeste de l'architecture mobile" contributed to question definitely the daring will planning to architectural design and urbanism. It was during that conference, and thanks especially to the youth of the Team 10, that "mobile architecture" was coined in the sense of "mobility of living." With the example of "Ville spatiale", Friedman set out - for the first time - the principles of an architecture capable of understanding the constant changes that characterize the "social mobility" and based on "infrastructure" that provide housing. Planning rules could be created and recreated, according to the need of the inhabitants and residents. Its focus on people themselves arises from its direct experience of homeless refugees, first in European cities facing war and disaster and later in Israel, where, in the early years of the State, thousands of people landed every day, with housing problems .
In 1958, he founded the Groupe d'études de architecture mobile (GEAM), dissolved in 1962. In 1963, he developed the idea of a city bridge and participated actively in the cultural climate and utopian architecture of the 60s known as the "Age of megastructures". Since the mid-sixties he has taught at MIT, Princeton, Harvard and Columbia universities. In the following decade he worked for the United Nations and UNESCO, through the dissemination of self-building manuals in African countries, South America and India. Despite the perennial utopian label, Friedman said: "I have always tried, in architectural studies, to develop projects that were feasible." In 1978, he was commissioned to design the Lycée Bergson in Angers, France, completed in 1981. On this occasion he published a procedure in which the distribution and arrangement of all the architectural elements were designed and decided by future users. Because even non-professionals can understand and apply his method, he wrote also howto comics. Interest in the issue of participation has brought Friedman to architects like Giancarlo De Carlo and Bernard Rudofsky.
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