Yona Friedman - "La ville spatiale" (1958 ; 2007)

Born in Budapest in 1923, lives and works in Paris.

Yona Friedman is an architect and theorist of visionary urban planning of international acclaim who is working at creating achievable utopia. He sees his role as an architect not as a designer, but rather as a consultant in charge of helping residents to draw up their own buildings. With his “ville spatiale” (spatial city), designed in the 1950s, he intended to enable citizens to organize the city freely, to build housing for which any modification, transfer or destruction would only incur low costs due to their mobility and possible reuse. It is built up from this in successive layers. There are few constraints: the resident can move the housing freely around the implemented network. Due to its straddled system, the spatial city can be superposed onto any other city. Working with Friedman, and under the leadership of Helfe Ihnen and Marianne Sewell, a group of architects came together to create an urban area according to the spatial city principles on Second Life.

Selected recent exhibitions :

2007 « Yona Friedman », Museum of contemporary art, Lyon, France.
2006 « Utopias réalizables », CAAC, Sevilla/Alicante/Madrid, Spain.
2004 « Archisculpture », Beyerler Foundation, Basle, Switzerland.
2003 « Utopia Station », Venice Bienial, Italy.
2001 « Ville spatiale », Yokohama Trienial, Japan.
2000 « Théorie et Images », Institut français d'architecture, Paris, France.