Road map for a concrete utopia

Conversing with Yona Friedman

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: As an architect and urbanist, your diagrams and drawings have also played a significant role; they are sort of like road maps to Concrete Utopias.
Yona Friedman: I would like to clarify my terminology. For me, a utopia becomes realizable if it has software (all utopias have one), but it should also have a clearly defined goal. The software, as I interpret the term in this case, consists of “instructions for use” and – this is important – visualisation of the output to expect.
Utopias can also be considered as concrete (whatever the term alludes to) without “instructions” and “visualisation”, but then they are not necessarily “realizable”.
I have always tried to accentuate that they’re only visualisations. I had the opportunity to make them reality once or twice in my lifetime. In those conditions each project permitted individuals to act in their own way, without any persuasion from my side, and without any prevision as to the future shape of the object.

HUO: That also leads to the idea of the free organisation or self-organisation of a Utopia in a certain way.
YF: In mobile architecture there are only a minimum number of fixed material points; there are very few foundations and, if possible, no networks, in order to make it as independent of networks as possible. So, it could be feasibly imaginable that a neighbourhood of mobile architecture could change its shape every 24 hours, or at least part of its shape. And that is completely imaginable. I was looking for this and technically it is feasible. The complications are linked to ideas of consensus. Not everyone wants mobility. People are, for the most part, conservative, so there is a continually changing equilibrium between mobility and immobility. And that’s how the human animal lives.

HUO: You also spoke about rumours as erratic movements within the city.
YF: Communication is always erratic. I always insist on the individuality and irregularity of behaviour – erraticity I call it, because erraticity means that knowing one state of a system, I can not have any idea about what the next state will be.

HUO: And what about your notion of the material and immaterial aspects of the city?
YF: It is a feeling of the human animal to fix rules and to be free within that frame.
Real freedom relies so much on the right mixture, the right proportion of the fixed and non-fixed. And that’s really what doesn’t give me the right to consider myself entirely an architect because the non-architectural aspects of life are often more interesting for me; the purely professional side is not always so interesting.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist