Yona Friedman Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Yona Friedman (1923-2020) was a Hungarian-born French architect, urban planner and artist whose ideas influenced generations of architects. In his 1958 manifesto Mobile Architecture he argued that inhabitants, not architects, should shape their homes and cities, and he proposed the Spatial City, a raised three-dimensional grid over existing cities into which people could insert their own dwellings. He spent much of his career developing these ideas through drawings, models, books and self-built structures.

Budapest, Haifa and Paris

Friedman was born in Budapest in 1923 into a Jewish family and survived the Second World War in Hungary. After the war he went to Haifa, where he studied architecture at the Technion and worked as an architect. In 1957 he settled in Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life and became a French citizen.

Mobile Architecture and the Spatial City

At the CIAM congress in Dubrovnik in 1956 Friedman presented ideas about flexible, user-determined housing, and in 1958 he founded the Groupe d’Études d’Architecture Mobile (GEAM) and published Mobile Architecture. His Spatial City (Ville Spatiale) was a lightweight structure raised on pillars above existing cities, rivers or farmland, leaving the ground free while residents filled the grid with their own homes. The idea influenced Archigram, the Metabolists and later megastructure projects.

Books, manuals and self-planning

In books such as Toward a Scientific Architecture and Realizable Utopias, Friedman explored how people could plan for themselves. For UNESCO and the United Nations he produced simple illustrated manuals on building and survival for communities around the world, and in Madras (now Chennai) he helped create the Museum of Simple Technology. His built works include the Lycée Bergson in Angers (1981), designed with its future users.

Late recognition

Friedman’s ideas returned to the spotlight in the 2000s through exhibitions and installations around the world, such as his Spatial City structures built from hoops and wire, his “Street Museum” and his 2016 Serpentine Summer House in London, a modular cube structure that visitors could reconfigure. He died in Paris in February 2020 at the age of 96.