What does a utopian look like? To an infinitely graceful man, courteous gentleman to the gentle Mitteleuropa, to a dreamy exile whose accent evoked the distant birth in Budapest in 1923, to an intellectual who did not speak to say the least. Yona Friedman was 96 years old and a childish curiosity. He did not need to draw a unicorn woman, huge alien, on the hills of the island of Vassivière (Limousin) in 2009 to touch the myth. This visionary artist of “mobile architecture” and of the “space city”, was honored under the arches of the Arsenal, the same year, at the Venice Biennale.
" Absolutely contemporary figure, neither architect, nor artist, nor theoretician ", he was and remains a model for a number of artists, architects and young emulators, admiring his intellect as well as his fantasy. They are the artists Mircea Cantor the Franco-Romanian and Camille Henrot the French to the duo of architects Jabob & MacFarlane, who announced his death on social networks Friday, February 22.
“ I have the memory of a dreamlike dinner in his company with the late Chinese artist, Huang Yong Ping , his friend and great art disciple, Jean de Loisy , and the curator of so many exhibitions, Hans Ulrich Obrist , from the Serpentine Gallery in London. To remake the world, during an after dinner, until no time. I remember his quick wit. He directed the conversations with great expediency. He was a true visionary, "greets his Parisian gallery owner, Kamel Mennour. The child's neurons and joy mingled in him like a single mathematical formula.
His Eiffel Unicorn , ephemeral sculpture in marl whose span was 324 meters. Courtesy Kamel Mennour
In 2009, the gallery owner had organized a helicopter trip from Paris so that Yona Friedman had the joy of discovering from the sky her Eiffel Unicorn , an ephemeral sculpture in marls whose wingspan was 324 meters (like the Eiffel Tower) posed at the top of the hill where the International Center for Art and Landscape nestled on the island of Vassivière (Limousin). To see it in its entirety, the visitor who had followed its outline on foot in the grass, had to climb to the top of the dark red lighthouse of Aldo Rossi which dominates the island.
At the same time affable and strange, mute then talkative
" Arriving in Vassivière by helicopter, by air, this is how Yona wanted to apprehend her Eiffel Unicorn (" A woman "as he said) for the first time: the first look at her was important. The Eiffel Unicorn was his first achievement on our island scale, with this durability, these materials. He said "I like unicorns: they do not exist, so they are peaceful", remembers Chiara Parisi who was then the young director of the place and who today runs the Center Pompidou-Metz. “ Yona gone, it's a sadness. We almost wished we didn't know. Some time ago, he went to his daughter's home in Los Angeles, far away ... We like to think that he is forever Los Angeles. When we don't say goodbye to people who have left us, we think they are alive somewhere. It was the amused gift he made to us . ”
Yona Friedman was a person at the same time affable and strange, mute then voluble, who did not forget herself, even if we only met him once. The visit to her Parisian apartment, a sort of accumulative model alone, decades old, strewn with models, papers, newspaper drawings like a heap of loose ideas, to the point of leaving only a thin path to move ... was a mind-boggling experience. A stroke of genius, or Diogenes syndrome.
His installations were halfway between architecture and plastic arts. Here, on the stand of Galerie Kamel Mennour. Courtesy Kamel Mennour
“ In this immense laboratory of models and assemblies that make up its domestic universe, we find, pell-mell, several typologies of models: the“ merzstructures ”made from pharmaceutical packaging,“ the scribbles ”and“ the macaroni ” , made with electric cables, the "trains" with corks held by needles, the "spaces-chains", which are assemblies of Indian bracelets suspended from the ceiling or balanced on a shelf, the "crumpled" in suspension like clouds, then the "laméllaires", rolls of cash register stapled to each other, and so on ", said Caroline Cros in 2009 during her exhibition at Kamel Mennour.
“ I will always remember my meeting with him on July 14, 2016, in his legendary apartment on boulevard Garibaldi. It was very hot; Yona was already 92 years old. , tells us the Parisian gallery owner, Jérôme Poggi. He was waiting for me on the landing of his apartment, with his immense smile and his sparkling gaze, full of intelligence and kindness. Alert. With total freedom, going from one room to another as if he were still twenty years old. I do believe he finally never stopped being twenty in his head. An eternal young man, who has never lost his ideals or made any concessions. While being extremely pragmatic, realistic. Nothing utopian or idealist. The proof? What he imagined, fifty years ago, has become the model for what allows us today to reinvent our democratic functioning ”.
Passionate about prefabricated housing and an aesthetic of simplicity
“ The apartment where he lived for decades was an incredible and indescribable cave. Even more than Ali Baba's cave, it was a real Kurt Schwitters-style Merzbau , invaded from floor to ceiling with models, collages, and salvage materials that he used to make new model projects. Moreover, the walls of his living room will enter the collection of the National Center for the Plastic Arts , continues Jérôme Poggi. “ I am impressed to have been able to rub shoulders with a legend from the 20th century. What a memory to mount your "Museum without Building" in front of the Grand Palais, nose to nose at the firefighting architecture of the Grand and Petit Palais, but also at the mercantile temple of FIAC. This is where we meet up with Yona. In this will to invent an economy and a democracy which escapes capitalism. His texts are so close to what we are implementing with the New Sponsors. Yona only drank Gewurztraminer, of which I always brought a bottle when I visited her, drank on leaving . ”
His life was long and fertile, as recalled by the two acts from his exhibitions at the Kamel Mennour Gallery, " Yona Friedman. Around the space city, 1957-1975 ”in spring 2009 and“ Yona Friedman. Métropole Europe and other projects ”in autumn 2010.
Yona Friedman said: I like unicorns: they do not exist, so they are peaceful '”. He also made a small illustrated book, charming and poetic, dear to the Danish gallery owner in Paris, Maria Lund. Courtesy Kamel Mennour
After a childhood in Hungary, the young Yona Friedman moved to Israel in 1946, where he experienced community life in a kibbutz. He then works in a construction company and completes his architectural studies begun in Europe, he seizes the assets of precarious and mobile housing ( Cylindral Shelters ), which he will try to develop, a decade later, with the complicity of Jean Prouvé. Both were passionate about pre-fabricated housing and an aesthetic of simplicity, devoid of style, underlined Caroline Cros in January 2009.
Definitely settled in Paris in 1957, Yona Friedman writes and distributes the Manifesto for Mobile Architecture , which will be immediately relayed thanks to the support of international architects like Frei Otto and the Japanese metabolists (the great Kenzo Tange whom he meets in Essen in 1962 and of which his Instagram account published the photo on November 25, 2019, but also Kiyonori Kikutake) in line with his architectural principles: mobility, flexibility, improvisation, renunciation of construction.
Camille Henrot pays tribute to their free and liberating exchanges. Courtesy Kamel Mennour
Very quickly, Friedman is connected with the whole world and founds the Mobile Architecture Study Group, in search of a growing, indeterminate and free architecture. From there stems his principle of the Space City which " consists in proposing successive layered construction systems, which he will decline, in the form of photomontages, from panoramic views (often post-postcards) from Paris, Tunis, Monaco…. ". In France, it is especially the artistic milieu which is interested in the utopian and experimental dimension of his works: first in the person of the great art critic Pierre Restany, who invited him in 1963 to exhibit at the gallery J, stronghold of the New Realists, then classified it among the "idealists" in the famous red "manifesto" published in Milan in 1968. Jean Dubuffet is also attentive to his work, while Gottfried Honneger, the main defender of Concrete Art in France, gives him his full support. From 1975, the ARC / Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris traces its course for twenty years, under the title Realizable Utopias .
"Be a priority rather than an builder"
Since the 2000s, it is the new artistic generation, which is still turning to him: international figures like the Danish-Icelandic artist from Berlin Olafur Eliasson and the French Pierre Huyghe ask him for collaborations. In 2002, Documenta XI in Kassel paid homage to him, while the Venice Biennale in June 2009 presented his most recent projects. “ From the start, Friedman sought to broaden the fields of application of architecture, rightly considering this practice as a non-specialized discipline, at the crossroads of philosophy, ecology, spirituality, mathematics, and science, in relation to all areas of society. Consequently, he considered that his role, as an architect, would be more that of observing individuals, their emotions and their actions, than of building and imposing a model. "I think like a sociologist," he said. Prioritize being an incentive rather than a builder. », Analyzed Caroline Cros.
Yona Friedman and the gallery owner Kamel Mennour. Courtesy Kamel Mennour
The so fierce Camille Henrot, Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale 2013 with her film Fat Fatigue paid him a vibrant tribute (in English) on her Instagram account. “ The first time I met Yona Friedman in 2005, he started the discussion by saying 'I learned everything by watching how my dog sat. What followed was long conversations on random subjects, from politics to family life, from cooking to clay drawing, from computer bugs to human art by the standards of our dogs. Later, we led many projects together (...) It is impossible for me to imagine the direction that my life and my work would have taken if I had not met him (...) learned to be determined, to integrate my mistakes and my life into my work, to favor the process over the successful outcome ”.
" Yona is no more. He simply left us with the same grace with which he appeared in our gallery years ago. Yona worked hard, despite her 96 years, old age and the diseases that accompany it. He had the enthusiasm of a child (a 96-year-old child) and when he spoke and smiled, he did it with his whole face, not just with his eyes, ”immediately testified his Italian gallery owner, Massimo Minini.