[Previous entry: "THE FINE ART OF ART COLLECTING: AN INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD GOLDMAN"] [Next entry: "THE ARMORY SHOW 2008"]
03/24/2008: "TRIBUTE TO YONA FRIEDMAN - “You do your city”"
For the next four months, the whole city of Bordeaux pays tribute to the Hungarian architect Yona Friedman. The Musée des Beaux Arts is displaying an exhibition around the fantastic creator, now eighty-five years old. The CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art and the Architectural Centre Arc en Rêve have also organised a number of rooms showing the genius of Yona Friedman, the architect and the artist.
In six of the monumental rooms of the CAPC, the beautiful stone walls are covered with the mostly phantasmagorical projects of the artist. Walls covered not only with the many photographs drawn over with white marker pen, but also prints of his more educational side, dispensing ideas and thoughts about different subjects, trying to communicate his view of a healthy way of life.
Yona Friedman collaborated with the United Nations and many Third World countries for many years, and it was through this experience that he found the need to share his knowledge and have a go at teaching, in his own way. An entire room in the CAPC is devoted to this educational process, coloured A4 pages pinned up on metal partitions, each displaying three of four pictures drawn in a very simple style and with a short sentence next to each image. Ideas as varied as “What is a Region?” and “How to look after the environment” are explained in a very simple process, made available to everyone. This educational method is a very specific side of Yona Friedman’s work, his will to transmit in some way or another his knowledge, to communicate with people with less traditional methods.
The rest of the space is wallpapered with the numerous projects that Yona Friedman has elaborated over the years, most of them based on his ideal of the “spatial city”, that is to say a city elevated above the actual buildings, to solve the problem of space and to make the most of areas that are less exploited. For example, Friedman came to the conclusion that railway tracks take up a huge amount of space (in the city of Paris, they represent over three quarters of the historic city centre surface). In order to create affordable spaces without striving to find the space, Friedman teamed up with German engineer Konrad Wachsmann to create “spatial cities” above the tracks.
Of course, many of these projects remain simple projects. They are more ideals, utopian thoughts set on paper, like the project for the Paris 2008 Olympics, or the Museum of the 21st century, in the French capital as well. But that is what makes Friedman’s designs so likeable. He strives to think beyond the structural necessities and solve social needs through his architecture. He tries to incorporate the notion of everyday life and costs into functional yet aesthetic buildings.
Many of his projects are centred around France and its capital. This is mainly because Paris has been Yona Friedman’s home since 1959. In a way, he wants to give back to the city what the city gave him, by welcoming him with open arms almost half a century ago. This idea sticks in the exhibition in Bordeaux, as the last two rooms are devoted to the city, and the architect, as well as presenting his own projects for the town, also invites each spectator to “design” his building and add it to Bordeaux, by the means of a huge map of the Gare Saint Jean area and plastic, paper, scissors, sticky tape and corks (reference to the wine that irrigates the land) that people are invited to cut out, build and place where they want.
Yona Friedman invites people into his world, to witness his way of thought and to participate in the creative process. Often snubbed by the architectural world for his lack of realism, the museums of Bordeaux pay tribute to this great master, who has influenced many others and shown us another way of looking at buildings and conceiving space.
“True utopias are those we can put into practice. Believing in a utopia is not incompatible with being a realist. A utopia is in its very essence practicable.”
Photo Credits:
Goldman in Cornfield - by Jennifer Argenta
Collector visit - by Marlene Picard
Getty Museum - by MarlenePicard
