Yona Friedman

Yona Friedman studied at the Technical University in Budapest, before continuing his training from 1945 to 1948 at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, where he worked as an architect until 1957. In 1953-54, he met Konrad Wachsmann, whose studies on prefabrication techniques and three-dimensional structures had a considerable influence on him.
In 1954, together with some inhabitants of Haifa, Friedman embarked upon an initial experiment involving housing designed by the occupant, but this project never reached completion. In 1956, at the 10th International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in Dubrovnik, modernism was called into question by his universalist approach and his belief in progress. At the Congress, when people were taking “mobile architecture “to mean the mobility of the dwelling” the “mobile home“ for example” Friedman exhibited for the first time the principles of an architecture encompassing the on-going changes required to provide “social mobility”, based on dwellings and town-planning provisions that could be composed and re-composed, depending on the intentions of the occupants and residents. The Dubrovnik debate gave rise to several think-tanks within the International Congresses, as well as beyond them.
Thus it was that in December 1958, Friedman founded the Mobile Architecture Study Group (MASG) which, up until 1962, would focus on the adaptation of architecture to the changes occurring in modern life. He was joined by Kühne, Otto, Ruhnau, Hansen, Frieden and, after 1960, Schulze-Fielitz and Maymont.
Yona Friedman’s work spans urban models, theoretical texts and animated films. He has participated in several biennial art exhibitions, including Shanghai, Venice and Documenta. His visionary, ground-breaking ideas have been at the forefront for several generations of architects and urban planners, and have clearly influenced the likes of Arata Isozaki or Bernard Tschumi. In 1956, he published his “Manifeste de l’architecture Mobile,” which set an urban structure on piles suitable for areas where building had not been not possible. This text was in turn used as the founding document of the Groupe d’étude d’architecture mobile (GEAM). He developed urban concepts such as La ville spatiale-the Spatial City where dwellings are freely distributed by the citizens thanks to low-cost, reusable mobile models.