Balkis and I in front of Les Invalides
Warning to the reader This book is not actually a “book.” It is a collection of fragments on scattered topics. They don’t form a coherent whole, nor my “testament.” I even did not include some texts which are crucial for what one would call my “oeuvre,” as these texts were already largely published. These fragments were written in different periods of my life, some of them published on different occasions. Unrelated as they might seem, I selected them according to the sentimental value I attached to them. I feel they are milestones of my preoccupations, but milestones not in chronological order. I ask the reader to excuse me for this egoistic attitude, but I hope that – here or there – some points might be interesting to read.
Yona Friedman Pro Domo To the memory of my father
Contents
Pro domo 9 Interview with myself 26 Comments on my work 48 Notes at the bottom of the page 56
chapter 1 Genesis of an idea
On theoretical models 113 On interpretation 118 Interpretation of the city 126
chapter 3 Theories at large
Ten principles of mobile town planning 65 A complement of the ten principles of mobile town planning 70 Softening the city 72 Continent cities 75 Cities in the 3rd millennium 97 Some afterthoughts on the WTC attack 109
chapter 2 The city
The Flatwriter: choice by computer 129 About the Flatwriter 137 ISEA 2000 139
chapter 4 Methods
The quaternary sector 147 Arguments for a poor world 172 Two ways 182 Towards a Policy of Urban Survival 186 Urban agriculture 192 Green architecture 194
chapter 5 Survival
Structures without rules and their implementation in architecture 205 Irregular structures 214
chapter 6 Irregular Structures
Paris Olympique 253 Venezia Nuova 260 Huangpu River Center, Shanghai 262 Ville spatiale with Venice Biennale panel 268 A museum for the 21st century 270 A museum which changes with every new exhibition 274 A proposal concerning New York 278 Tel-Aviv Peace-bridge 282 The “umbrella� of Les Halles 284 Berlin 288 Art exhibition for the year 2000, Brussels 294 Ville spatiale over Milan Stadium 296 New route through the medina, Tunis 298 Monte-Carlo 300 Development over a Paris terminal 304 Railway stations 308 Nancy 310 Paris Spatial 312
chapter 7 Projects, new and old
Genesis of an idea
8
Pro domo Paris, 2006 After Cicero’s speech “pro Domo sua” defending his own cause before the Senate
When I was a schoolboy, I discovered that a house alone does not exist, that it does not end at the outer limits of the ground floor, but continues on to the streets, the garden, then, to the house across the street. The house across the street itself continues into what is in front of it, and so forth. To imagine one house is to imagine the whole world. Each individual imagines his own house. Thus, each one imagines his own world. Each house that is imagined by its inhabitant is different; each world imagined by an individual is different. A house and a world do not have to look like the house and the world that is imagined by others. At the same time, houses and worlds imagined by others are real for each individual. We live with the others, our “neighbours” and their imagined houses and worlds also belong to our world, our “environment.” We live in a world made up of unique individuals. Our world is formed by our “neighbours,” a common reality. As a young architect, I began to discover the way to create a house imagined by its inhabitant, even if its form or its plan was different from the one imagined by others. How could we adapt the form an inhabitant thinks of one day to another form he would prefer later, another day? I thus began to search for a “technique.” The first idea of a technique came from the hypothesis of a non-geometrical “amoebic” form, a completely irregular plan which had the capability of being modified. In the 1940s, the idea of prefabrication, with the use of “panels,” became popular. I thought of a “folding screen,” a “chain of panels” linked together with hinges. In 1945, when I was in exile in Bucharest, I started to draw the plans of possible houses where the partitions would have been such folding screens, and, following the same logic, also in the “houses across the street.” One technical issue remained, the “roof”, the “ceiling” which was to cover these “folding screen enclosures.” The outline of the roof cannot easily be regular,
9 / Genesis of an idea
The Museum of Simple Technology in Madras (India) demonstrated the practicality to build without plans drawn on paper. The bamboo grid-domes supported the roof made with bamboo mats covered with aluminium foils.
20
Visualization of a neighborhood built with the Madras technique
21 / Genesis of an idea
Interview with myself (a kind of balance) 1997
Dramatis personae The witness Someone clever, with no preconception, whose efforts tend to make the interviewees’ discourses clearer. His questions are, voluntarily, simple questions that include no prejudice. If I had considered myself, “me,” to be the witness, I would probably not have conducted this “inquiry” in the same way, but imagining myself in the role of the witness, I have tried not to impose my own opinions in the questions of the witness. The young architect This is I, in the sixties, dazzled by the unexpected discoveries I have found. This young architect’s point of view seems right to me but a bit limited, nowadays. It comes from a rationalist intuition, if we can indeed say rationalist, often driving to misunderstandings, but leading instinctively to right answers. The over-evaluation of the technical factor, as well as the unpredictability and erratic nature inherent in every decision, presses the young architect to search a new sharing of the role of the technician who has to “serve” and not decide, as well as the role of the individual user whose behaviour is neither predictable nor always interpretable. Mobile architecture is essentially a “new deal” of responsibilities. The old man This is me again, but in the nineties. His attitude is not critical in relation to the views of the young architect but he tries rather to generalise the options which, at first, were rather intuitive, and to gather them in an understandable and unified image of the world. What is valid for the universe is also valid in architecture. What is valid for both is available to the general public, in spite of the impossibility of communicating “everything.” It is necessary to define what may be shared and what cannot be shared.
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The witness You are well known in the architectural field throughout the world, for your manifesto “Mobile Architecture” and for the movement which followed it. Would you explain how you worked up to this initiative? The young architect From the beginning of my architecture studies, I have never been truly comfortable with the reasoning of those who decide that an architectural plan is good or bad. I felt that the arbitrary side and the analysis presented by my teachers seemed more than doubtful to me. Most of them appraised their analysis of the plan presented by a student much more according to the way they felt personally about the student than by the possible merits of his work. I was deeply moved by this discovery. Who can truly decide the value of a project? So, with two friends, I tried to invent a housing project which included only a wide empty volume, in which the future inhabitants could move portable installations, that is to say kitchen, sanitary installations, cupboards, etc., according to their desires. With these components, it was possible to divide the flat into one, two, three or four rooms, of various arrangements, according to each resident’s preferences. The old man I have come back to this idea forty-six years later, in a project to house the homeless (two walls and a roof). The young architect The beginning of mobile architecture came about in 1949. To be fair, the inhabitant should make the decisions and the labour of the architect should be to assist and help him make these decisions. The witness After you finished your degree in 1949, you worked as an independent architect, at the same time teaching at the Technion, in Haifa. Does your experience as a “designer” help you to consolidate these initial ideas? The young architect Quite early on, in 1953, I saw myself in charge of one of the first social housing buildings. The project was, perhaps, innovative, according to local standards, but the authorities absolutely refused to let the inhabitant take even the smallest initiative. On the contrary, something I find strange is that one day, the Housing Minister, while visiting the yard, asked to add a window to a certain place. The contractor immediately ordered the wall to be torn down to install the window according to the Minister’s wishes. I was, once again, deeply moved by this episode. After all, it wasn’t the Minister who was to going to live in the house. So, why were the inhabitants denied the right to express themselves?
27 / Genesis of an idea
Model photographs of the “ville spatiale”
34
Random distribution Regular patterns
35 / Genesis of an idea
96
Cities in the 3rd millennium This text was originally published in French in Théorie et images. Yona Friedman, (Paris: Éditions Institut français d’architecture, 2000)
The first cities emerged amid agrarian civilizations and appear to have functioned as reservoirs for artisans, whose skills were indispensable even when these cities continued to live by agriculture. They did not have a strict hierarchy. Their organization may have been founded on a sort of direct democracy. Consciously ordered as they were, these early urban societies were without doubt the first social utopias. In 1961, I drew a map of Europe that has often been re-published. It indicated the network of main railway lines, in which city-stops for express trains marked the tie points. It resembled the European Intercity map today. It was the outline of the continent-city. The continent-city is not a megalopolis: it is a network of fast transports in which the ties are existing cities while the mesh contains agricultural lands, natural reserves, etc. If the megalopolis is characterized by uniformity of urban fabric, the continentcity conserves the existing structure of territory, which may extend over the entire land mass of a continent. Its dimensions reflect the network’s isochronous contours, as determined, for example, by the average speed of the TGV train (1000 Km in 3 hours). The European Union is in the process of becoming a continent-city, with an average ‘distance’ of 2-3 hours between big cities. Obviously, my title does not announce an historical study, nor has it anything to do with visionary speculation. All I propose to do is draw up a balance sheet to inform thought, and to consider possible directions for urban development by taking into account techniques and trends that can be observed – sporadically – today. This being said, before going on I would also like to point out that the design of big cities has changed very little since the dawn of civilization. If you compare the site plans of Babylon, Rome, Paris, London and New York, you will see what I mean at a glance. And even in the 20th century, the transformation from pre- to post-industrial conditions brought negligible results in terms of urban design. At first sight, the hypothesis according to which this tradition will continue in cities of the 3rd millennium seems plausible. But when we look at things closely, we see that important changes are already under way.
97 / The city
“Ville spatiale.” A floor distribution model. “Ville spatiale” – the mille-feuille drawings. The drawing was made by collages on tracing paper showing, each sheet, one of the floors, ground floor included. The actual image is the result of the superposition of all the collages. Essentially, this technique is a variant I used for the large models.
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“Ville spatiale�: model for the Beaubourg Center (1970)
Model (1960)
125 / Theories at large
Interpretation of the city I understand the species interpretation of the world to be the image of the “outside” world that all members of a species create and the relation they have with that outside. At the primary level, there is no differentiation between “outside” and oneself, the “I”. This is a “holistic” image of the momentary state of things. This holistic interpretation is largely emotional. A baby does not separate his emotions, the components “outside of his skin” and the effective perceptions “inside.” Most high vertebrates look at the world the same holistic way. A dog, for instance, sees only a blurred image and only rarely distinguishes distinct entities within that image. The human species, in its adult state, looks at the world differently. Human “species interpretation” sees primarily distinct “things,” and creates a general image by adding these “things” up into a whole. I call this way of interpreting “analytical interpretation.” Species interpretation determines the general behaviour of all the members of a given species. Species interpretation can be mainly “holistic” or mainly “analytic” but it never seems to be purely holistic or analytic. It is always some mixture of both. I would like to reconsider what we call a city, a special human representation which determines a special behaviour of the human species. The interesting thing here could be a gradual change of such interpretation, shifting towards a more holistic character. The “analytical” interpretation of the city is an accumulation of individual “houses.” The rules, neglecting the disposition and size of such an accumulation might vary locally, but the analytic concept of the city fundamentally stays the same. Cities of past centuries had to include a holistic undertone within the analytic interpretation. The city was the collector of houses “inside” the city walls. The history of the founding of Rome, for example, starts with the wood which defined the city limits. Modern cities unconsciously reject a fixed city precinct. Their accumulation grows and is able to grow without tangible limits. My personal orientation tends to lean towards a balanced combination of the analytical and the holistic interpretations of the concept of a city. The two
126
images I have attempted to develop, in this direction, are the “ville spatiale” and the “continent city.” The “ville spatiale” is somewhat like a walled city. The individual homes are “inside” with an “infrastructure” (for example, a space-frame skeleton). At the same time, they are independent from the structure, which does not influence their shape or their disposition, unlike the medieval city wall, which had an influence on the individual architecture of a building. The “ville spatiale” comes as close to a holistic concept of the city as possible. Let us now look at the “continent city.” The term means the existing cities on a continent, linked by a very rapid transport network. That organisation turns the continent into a “super-city,” the neighbourhoods of which are the existing cities and the rapid transit network is its “metro.” The continent city is also holistic. Even though component cities are the elements which form the continent city, the whole of it is the true entity which works separately from the parts which make it up. The cities of a continent in the 19th century were independent elements and the continent was only an abstraction, whereas the continent city of today is holistic. All its city-parts work only within that togetherness. Our interpretation of the city, at any particular scale, has a tendency to be a holistic interpretation. Are we, as particular individuals, living within a super-organism? I don’t think so. We live in our own little corners but we see, feel and look beyond them. The new holistic city has practically no boundaries. It is a tissue, a structure. We are back to the ancestral species interpretation, nearly to that of all higher vertebrates. The universe is a whole and we feel its states but we cannot follow all individual processes of all individual components. We live in a very small space but we feel the states as a whole. Like my dog does... This dual interpretation is true about architecture as we feel it. We analytically see all the components but we feel it in a holistic way. Holistic interpretation is emotional. A simple explanation can be given through the example of language. Humanity, thinking analytically, gives names to distinct components, thus inventing articulate language, a vehicle of information. A dog’s language is not articulate; it does not use “names” for things. It is not a vehicle of information. It is emotional, perhaps even poetic...
127 / Theories at large
Self-help structures with local materials (bamboo or other, according to local context!). The structure used is that of arched domes. Hill of the Winds. Space-frame structure with wind-energy generators.
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Self-help structures (arched domes).
181 / Survival
226
Proteinic chains
227 / Irregular structures
234
Ville spatiale (above: Interwoven City, a spatial labyrinth)
235 / Irregular structures
242
Griboullis (scrabble)
243 / Irregular structures
Projects, new and old
252
253 / Projects / Paris Oly m piq ue (2004)
I began to conceive this project before I had even visited Shanghai. It was made as an idea sketch, full of naïve visions based on a rough map. But even so, the purpose of this sketch was to visualise three principles of urban planning, principles originating from my personal view of the inhabitant as the primary user of the city. These three principals are the following: 1 It is the inhabitant of the city who should have the right and the material possibility to determine the site and shape of his own domicile, to transform it and to continuously improve it. The built volumes of the city would thus change year after year and the cityscape could never be definite. This is “mobile architecture.” The technical proposal for this purpose consists of a space frame skeleton. The effective used volumes, determined by their particular inhabitants, would be inscribed into the voids of that skeleton. 2 The continuity of urban tissue should be maintained throughout the entire urban area, through inhabited bridges spanning over “gaps” like rivers or railway yards. Thus a street, and not just a simple “corridor bridge,” should span over such gaps. This type of design allows the pedestrian to “cross the gap” without “leaving the city.” 3 The people who “use the city” are always pedestrians. Even if they reach the city centre by car, etc., they are pedestrians when shopping, visiting, etc. To make “using the city” easier for pedestrians, I proposed the “pedestrian metro,” a combination of skyways (overhead footbridges which avoid car traffic) and “speedways” (moving bands). This system allows the pedestrian to move at approximately 10 km/h. This “pedestrian metro” would have outlets to the street every 30 to 50 metres. Cities are a collectivity formed by individuals. These individuals act mainly as pedestrians. The Shanghai Project was made to be a set of visual demonstrations of these three principles.
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263 / Projects / H uang pu River Centre, Shanghai (2002)
My competition project for the Centre Beaubourg (present Pompidou Center) was based in the principle of “mobile architecture.” It consisted of a an “infrastructure” (a multi-level space-frame skeleton) into which should be inserted the building components tangible by the public (walls, partitions, floors, ceilings) and which contains at the same time all ducts (wiring, piping, etc.). The mobility of walls and ceilings, according to this technique, would make it possible to remake the building anew, let’s say every six months. Thus both the façade and the functional organization could be different with every new exhibition. The drawings show the initial project (year 0-March) and, as an example, several transformations of the façade for consecutive exhibitions (year 0-June, year 1-March, year 1-October, year 2-July, year 3-January). This means 6 different buildings (in the esthetic and functional sense) in 2 years. A building which changes with the same rhythm as its use could be a real innovation, not understood by the jury.
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275 / Projects / A m useu m w hich cha nges with every new ex hibition (1970)
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293 / Projects / Be rlin (2004)
Published by Actar (www.actar.com) Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura Concept Yona Friedman Editorial coordination Albert Ferré Dolors Soriano Anna Tetas Translations Wesley Trobaugh Estelle Roullier Graphic design Manuel Cuyàs Image documentation Marianne Homiridis Digital production Carmen Galán Leandre Linares Printing Ingoprint SA Distribution ACTAR D Roca i Batlle 2 E-08023 Barcelona Tel. +34 934 174 993 Fax. +34 934 186 707 www.actar-d.com office@actar-d.com ISBN 84-96540-51-0 DL B-40987-2006 All rights reserved © of texts and images, Yona Friedman © of the edition, ACTAR and JUNTA DE ANDALUCIA Printed and bound in the European Union