ART
Yona Friedman |
Written 30 January |
Thursday 22 January, 11:00Galerie Kamel Mennour, 75006 [map]
Yona Friedman is one of the most interesting and important theorists and utopians of architecture of our time. Inspired by the housing shortage in France during the late 1950s and the belief in individual inhabitant’s rights in housing plan development and architectural design, where Architecture should only provide a framework, in which the inhabitants might construct their homes according to their needs and ideas, free from any paternalism by a master builder, Yona Friedman’s The Spatial City (Ville spatiale) is an unrealized theoretical construct whereby Friedman raised a second city fifteen to twenty meters above the existing one. The framework was to be erected first, and the residences conceived and built by the inhabitants inserted into the voids of the structure. The layout of each level would occupy no more than fifty percent of the overall structure in order to provide air and light to each residence as well as to the city below. The project was designed for construction anywhere, and meant to be adapted to any climate. To this day, these visionary mega-structures, overarching existing cities, whose inhabitants were to be enabled to flexibly shape their spatial and social worlds, have been much-discussed classics of avant-garde urban planning, inspiring generations of architects and urban planners.
