“After spending 96 years on Earth, Iona Friedman set out to construct his Spatial Cities in Heaven,” the Denise and Iona Friedman Foundation said on Instagram, stressing that this foundation, created last year, will continue its work (photo: Pavel Almazi, 1974) …
Jonah Friedman, commonly referred to as a “French architect of Hungarian descent,” was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Budapest, fought in the Resistance in 1944-1945, and later settled in Haifa, where he received his diploma in architecture in 1949. Moving to Paris in 1957, he became a French citizen in 1964.
He is known primarily as the author of the idea of "mobile architecture" - a spatial structure filled and modified by the inhabitants themselves. The idea, influenced by Frédéric Kiesler's Cities in Space, Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau and Konrad Vashman's lattice aircraft hangars, was first announced as a manifesto at the CIAM congress in Dubrovnik in 1956. The architect then founded the International Group for Future Architecture - GIAP, Groupe international d'architecture prospective, - along with critic and historian Michel Ragon, who also passed away this February.
Friedman's ideas, in turn, influenced the Archigram group, Japanese metabolists, Moshe Safdie, Anna Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, and many other architects of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Jonah Friedman has written many books, including in recent years, and even created "comics" explaining his ideas, but he built very little. At the same time, he always emphasized that he did not recognize himself as a utopian, and in 1974 he even published the book "Realizable Utopias".
His designs were a city on legs, raised above the ground, for example, over historical buildings, for example, over Paris, and based on a kind of lattice-structure, capable of self-development and self-transformation by the forces of people living in it. “Architecture today can follow the rhythm of life of its inhabitants,” said Jonah Friedman. - The mistake of modern architecture is that it understands itself as an enlarged sculpture; the architectural space is too forgotten; architecture does not need a facade, but a changing interior space. " Friedman's mobile architecture, according to his own statement, has a lot in common with furniture - things that are fundamentally moved around the house - but only the architect proposes to move the walls, since "a person is different in his 20s, 40s, 60s and 90s," and he a different habitat is required.
The upper structure is permeable and transparent, with many holes to illuminate the space below. The idea was voiced that such a network could spread to the entire globe or to a significant part of it.
What gives the Mobile City, in addition to the volumetric-spatial pathos of self-growing “natural” structures, because of which Fridman is called an “iconoclast”, is also significant social content. No wonder the first project of the architect, even before moving to France, was devoted to the resettlement of settlers in Israel; at the end of his life he also dealt with housing for refugees (see interview with Berlogos), trying to offer some modules, elements of housing, for example, cubes, that can help people organize themselves in space instead of "putting [refugees] in barracks."
The only building of Jonah Friedman in France is the Henri Bergson Lyceum in Angers (1979-1980). There he, being true to his principles, entrusted the planning to teachers, school administration, students and parents.
In 1982, Friedman's Museum of Simple Technologies, a permeable structure of domes woven from bamboo, was established in Madras (now Chennai), an installation that was the result of his research on vernacular technologies, initiated by UNESCO. On legs, of course. Reproduced in Bangladesh 2018.
Jonah Friedan's ideas were very influential in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then forgotten and "rediscovered" in the 1990s, when many of his works entered the CNAP collection of the National Center for Fine Arts of France. In the 2000s, Friedman was mainly occupied with installations, creating spatial structures from rings and parallelepipeds, which he positioned, among other things, as devices for open-air expositions.
