Interview: Yona Friedman
It took Daniel Birnbaum just over four hours to travel from Frankfurt to Yona Friedman’s apartment in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. On his arrival, he boasted to the 86-year-old architect that since June 2007 travel time between these two European cities had effectively halved. It was a boast with a purpose. Friedman, a theoretician of infrastructure as much as an artist, was the first to posit in 1960, the idea that Europe was in fact a single urban entity which could be connected by a high speed rail. Friedman was not impressed however. ‘It should be faster,’ he said. On my arrrival, the mind of the great theoretician of supple moderrnity is less on traveling to Paris than on the city itself and President Sarkozy’s recently announced vision for a greater Paris. ‘It has nothing to do with urban planning. London is largely unplanned and it’s a metropolis. Paris is a big city but not because of Haussman,’ he says. ‘Architecture has nothing to do with it,’ he says, almost by way of introduction.
The greater part of Friedman’s life has been spent in thinking about infrastructure: understanding the strengths and weaknesses of transport and building systems. Yet he is known more for his influence on the art world. This is the second time he’s contributed to the Art Biennale in Venice – the last time was in 2003. This time his influence will be seen as even more impressive. He will be exhibited alongside a whole range of younger artists who are interested in the relationship between the individual and utopias. Jochen Volz is co-curating the Venice Biennale. ‘There’s a certain group of artists who are coming to the fore at the moment which you just couldn’t imagine without Yona Friedman. Someone like Thomas Saraceno is totally inspired by a utopian mind like Yona,’ he says.
His apartment itself is a work of art. Stuck to the walls are Matisse-like cut outs of with captions in English. “The First Simple Truth: We Cannot Understand The Universe,” reads the first. “The Second Simple Truth: We Do Not Need To Understand the Universe’ reads the next. The Third Simple Truth is unfortunately hidden by a pile of spent light bulbs arranged in a bowl. And that’s just the front room. The rest of the apartment is an orientalist collage. Layers of models and books are superimposed upon pictures and paintings. Friedman has inscribed countless lines of hieroglyphics on thin polystyrene sheets in felt tip pen and hung them above his toilet.
It is an irony not lost on Friedman that, although he has exhibited twice at the Art Biennale, he has never been invited to the architecture Biennale. Indeed one suspects that he is rather pleased. Indeed he’s made a habit of triumphing in Venice in any area but architecture. ‘In the 1960s I was making films. I got a Golden Lion from Venice for a film about African legends. My wife was a movie editor so I said, “Why don’t I draw something?” I learned how to present a story in very simple drawings,’ he says. His animation though evolved from the way he communicated his ideas about architecture and society.
Yet the artists he has influenced are interested in exploring the contradictions between individual ideals and a unified vision of a better society. Friedman, on the contrary, is still interested in resolving them. Strewn across the floor of his apartment are models of inhabitable bridges, which he is using to create the brief for a competition in Shanghai. These models were first exhibited alongside a 50-year retrospective of his signature project La Ville Spatiale, at his gallery Kamel Mennour earlier this year in Paris. The parallels the projects are so strong as to make them look like a continuous act of design.
Another reason for the way in which Friedman’s ideas are now permeating the visual culture of Europe is the assiduous way in which he has continually returned to the essence of his own original idea – the endlessly adapted superstructure. Astonishingly it is an idea he first came up with when he was an exile from his native Budapest in heavily bombed Bucharest towards the end of World War II. He later escaped to Tel Aviv, where the strength of his drawings, permitted him to pass straight into third year of an architecture degree there. He was invited to the 10th CIAM congress 1956 in Dubrovnik but was disappointed by the indifference shown there towards mobile architecture.
In response he founded the Groupe d’Etudes d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) in 1958. He championed building by hand, using trial and error, allowing users to create their own parameters rather than have them ascribed to them. Late in life his two main experiences of building, the Lycée Bergson in Angers and the Museum of Simple Technology in Madras, were delivered by this system, which was anathema to the champions of prefabrication and industrialised construction.
Yet despite the manner in which the work of his contemporaries has passed into the vocabulary of mainstream architecture, Friedman’s ideas have hitherto been a footnote in the architectural history of Europe, particularly form a British perspective. This is partially because he bucked the post-war trend for avant-garde architecture. Certainly he agreed with architects with a strong socialist impulse about certain things. ‘When Cedric Price came out with the Fun palace this was influenced by the Ville Spatiale which was how I got to know him. Building is not an object it’s a process. Cedric liked very much this statement,’ he says. Yet in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist collected in the series Conversations, Friedman makes it clear that although he agreed with Price on many issues, they were at odds over others. For Friedman, it is the individual that is the basis of all human endeavour. For Price it was the collective.
‘No individual, whether in particle physics or sociology behaves according to abstract laws: call it the “principle of individuality,”’ he has said in the past. At the age of 18, with the Second World War raging around him, Yona Friedman attended a public lecture by the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg in his native Budapest. Heisenberg was the author of the Uncertainty Principle that says, that it is physically impossible to simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a quantum particle – a theory that has been extrapolated by some as a fundamental rejection of scientific objectivity. For Friedman, the lecture was a formative experience. One can’t help conjecture whether this was also because uncertainty was the very air he breathed. Three years after the lecture, the Nazis invaded Budapest. Friedman a young Jew was in the hands of the Gestapo when the Red Army finally lifted the siege. He escaped to Bucharest and then to Tel Aviv.
It is tempting to see Friedman’s world view stem solely from this formative period: his suspicion of the 20th Century’s big theories as much as his valorising of uncertainty. These ideas, of course, found little traction in the statist, and predominantly socialist France of the 1950s. It is not surprising that he should find a home in the 1960s at UCLA in California. His late wife didn’t like the American lifestyle and insisted on staying in their apartment, so he commuted. ‘It was suddenly possible when the Boeing 707 was launched. With the 707 the USA wasn’t so far away – it was a sensible difference,’ he says. He despairs of Los Angeles but goes back frequently, partly to visit his daughter who has settled there and partly because The Getty is buying his entire archive.
It is odd perhaps that an opponent of planning should dislike LA. ‘There is no such place,’ he says. ‘Pasadena and Santa Monica exist but not LA.’ Yet it is these apparently contradictory ruminations on the relationship between individuals and systems that make Friedman such an important thinker for architects as much as artists. Despite his time in California, however, he is fundamentally a European in his outlook. Friedman believes in a benign, neutral superstructure upon which individuals can craft their own world. The car pool lane should be given over to trolleybuses, is his prognosis for LA. He notes too that $8 billion from Obama’s economic stimulus package will be ploughed into a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Our European metropolis or continent city could be very much advanced with a similar Keynesian scheme,’ he says.
When Friedman moves, he does so at a steady pace, even though his apartment cluttered with statuary and models largely collected during his time working for UNESCO in India during the 1980s. An embroidered elephant stands outside his door – a toy discarded by one of his two daughters, which he has now re-appropriated. Indeed if Prince Philip is correct and all slack wiring is unique to India, then there is something of The Subcontinent about the way electricity cables drape across his room, festooned with garlands of beads and assorted trinkets.
India provided Friedman with the opportunity to explore systems at their most open. For UNESCO he developed a system of pictograms to transfer information relating to basic water management and food policy. This came to the attention of Indira Gandhi who liked it. Friedman then devised a system of transferring information across the country and was clearly delighted by the way that the books he created were copied and transmitted from community to community. Indeed pictograms were used by Indians to feed back information. ‘It’s a self-propagating technique…the Internet does the same thing by the way. Things creep like insects,’ he says.
What makes Friedman such a compelling thinker is his ability to discern systems and feel his way through them; what the system can deliver best and where its limitations are and these are the great issues of our age ‘The computer is a fantastic tool but it does what you embed in it. It has prefabricated functions that you don’t understand and not even a mathematicians doesn’t know,’ he says. Indeed he believes that society’s willingness to overlook the parameters, by which its systems have been defined, is a danger. Indeed what he calls, ‘the current economic crisis’ is a result of creating a system with an over-defined parameter. ‘Planning means that you consider every event possible, except an event which is unexpected. But sometimes the unexpected arrives. It’s a little thing and then it grows. It’s an avalanche by snowball. Nobody made a planning error. The error was that they tried to plan something which is not planable,’ he says.
It can all be a bit too contradictory for some. Reyner Banham was not a fan of Yona Friedman’s theories. After listening to the Paris-based architects theory on Europe as a single continent city with the Mediterranean, its Coney Island, he dismissed it as ‘Friedman’s Europe’. Indeed there are great contradictions between his ardent support of complex transport infrastructures and engineered superstructures and his aversion to planning, even if the former are created solely to allow individuals control of their own constantly adapting spaces. Yet as we climb aboard Eurostar for our return to London, we know we still have several decades to go before we reach the limit of the systems, which Friedman has discerned throughout his amazing life.
