Pro Domo by Yona Friedman

Architecture and Landscaping:

Yona Friedman

(1923– )

Hungarian-born, he moved to Paris in 1957, and made his reputation as an architectural theorist and visionary designer. With Frei Otto and others he founded the Groupe d'Étude d'Architecture Mobile (GEAM—Group for the Study of Mobile Architecture), and evolved the notion of the city as a primary permanent infrastructure or framework with a changeable impermanent secondary structure determined by the users and erected using simple technologies. He published several books expounding his ideas, including L'Architecture Mobile (1970) and Alternatives Énergétiques (1980). He has been considered as contributing to Experimental architecture, and is associated with Megastructures and Mobile architecture.

b Budapest, 5 June 1923). French architect of Hungarian birth. He studied architecture at the Technical University, Budapest (1943), but he left Hungary in 1945, completed his training at the Technion, Haifa (Dip. Arch., 1948) and subsequently taught. In 1956 he attended CIAM X in Dubrovnik, which confirmed his belief that requirements generated by technological progress and demographic growth were too great to be solved by traditional social, urban and architectural values and structures. In 1957 he settled in Paris and founded the Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile (GEAM) with Paul Maymont, Frei Otto, Eckard Schultze-Fielitz, Werner Runhau and D. G. Emmerich. The group's manifesto was Friedman's L'Architecture mobile (1958), in which he rejected the idea of a static city. In contrast he developed the principle of ‘infrastructure', a skeletal metal ‘space-frame grid' of several levels, on which mobile lightweight ‘space-defining elements' would be placed. He proposed to adapt these ideas for large cities by superimposing this grid on the existing fabric of London, Tunis and New York, or by allowing commercial facilities to be built over the network of high speed roads in Los Angeles.

Extract from "Pro Domo"

Monday, September 17, 2007

The following extract was taken from Yona Friedman's "Pro Domo" (Actar, 2006), pp. 118-123.

I believe that each animal species interprets the experience we call the "world" in its own way. I base this hypothesis on the observation I have made of dogs, the only other species I have known well enough as the human species.
In order to be able to define human interpretations, I have first tried to refer to what seems to me to be characteristic of a dog's interpretation of universe, although I cannot be absolutely sure.
It seems to me that dogs do not "see". What I mean by that is they do not pay attention to separated, individual "things". Their sight is holistic, images of a group of "things" at a given moment. These images contain everything that fits in a fixed and immobile "setting" which lasts a split second. As visual experience consists of a sequence of a non-determined length of images, their attention is absorbed by each change between two consecutive "settings," two movements. But the change they perceive is not the movement of any random thing, but it is the movement of the whole "setting". The whole universe changes, not just some parts of it.
Dogs seem to consider the whole universe as the "reservoir" of their means of survival. They take what they need from this reservoir at the moment they need it and do not care about what is left. Thus other dogs or any other living being wishing to take from the reservoir remain free to do so. Dogs do not accumulate reserves.
The fact that they do not collect goods prevents them from understanding the abstract idea of "property" and consequently, they do not understand the "barter system." If they leave something for others, they do not ask to be "paid" for it.
Beyond any doubt, a hierarchy of domination between dogs exists. The leader of the pack has preference over others to food or to court a female. "Canine society" is patriarchal.
But, very importantly, canine society never tries to have slaves; it never forces some dogs to do the jobs which others consider hard. A leader of a pack does not have servants.
Dogs seem to possess a developed sense of chronology. They notice that some events are followed by others with a seemingly exact certitude. But they do not seem to attribute the course of events to a causal chain. Dogs do not have "metaphysics".
My last remark about dogs has to do with the way they communicate.
Communication between dogs does not seem to need abstract symbols, phonetics or anything else. I think that the only components of canine communication are emotions, expressed by gestures and individual onomatopoeia, and that it does not imply a common code shared by all dogs. This communication between dogs is not useful to collective information.
Though dogs do not possess a language which carries information, they do know the "signals." The "signal" is not a symbol. All animals are attentive to signals, especially the larger felines.


Because Hugo was right - architecture today is about the press, not the building!

Pro Domo

Monday, September 17, 2007

It proudly states on the cover of this book that "this book is not actually a 'book'."
This isn't true - it is, in fact, a book and demonstrates all the attributes of bookiness.
The next sentence on the book's cover says "It is a collection of fragments on scattered topics produced in different periods of my life."
This is actually true and it makes the book quite interesting, largely due to the fact that its author, Yona Friedman, is quite an interesting person in that unorthodox kind of way.
So the book presents snapshots of Friedman's work from over the past 50 years as a kind of retrospective.
Friedman is not an architect whose name crops up regularly, even though his 1958 manifesto on "mobile architecture" and his "ville spatiale" influenced the much more famous Archigram group's plug-in city. More the theorist than practitioner, Friedman's work seems to be something of a contradiction of humanity and cold science. He says that "the two most important impulses in 20th century architecture, as it seems to me, are 1) space frame structures... and 2) the Merzbau of Kurt Schwitters." It is the combination of these that create the megastructure of the ville spatiale which is a huge framework built on stilts above the existing city. Within the framework, users can construct their own dwellings. This framework was proposed to be several stories high and can certainly not be called a thing of beauty. Friedman proposed it for cities all over the world as a kind of self-organisation: "My goal since 1945 has been to conceive a work of architecture without a plan, in other words, an improvised work."

But it's not just these ideas that occupied Friedman's fertile mind. He tinkered with processes to allow users to design their own dwelling plans - the Flatwriter - which is kind of like a typewriter with symbols to help users design their own dwellings within a larger framework. He also invented the concept of "continent cities", a network of railways connecting each city. This new vision of Europe is simlar to an idea in the Global Cities exhibition at last year's Venice Biennale, showing how much of Europe could be reached within x hours of a city using only railway travel, now that the Eurotunnel has linked the UK with the continent. This is a preferable situation to the megalopolis, claims Friedman, and The Sesquipedalist cannot disagree.

Friedman goes beyond the physical city to more involved social issues and discusses economics at length. According to economic theory, the three-sector hypothesis divides economies into three sectors of activity: extraction of raw materials (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and services (tertiary). Friedman augments this with his so-called "quaternary sector":

I call "quaternary sector" that fraction of the population called "inactive" (as opposed to "active") that performs socially useful work, but whose work does not figure in the gross national product."

This is all commensurate with him constantly thinking about the world as a whole, placing particular emphasis on the undeveloped nations. Other aspects of this thinking that are explored in this memoire are the participatory design exercises, erratic (or random) structures and structures built from rubbish. He covers the gamut from ground level interventions to abstract mathematics and seems to have a theory on all scales of life.

Interleaved between these writings are pages of quick cartoons, a method he devised to create "manuals" for self-plan projects. These are line drawings with stick men to quickly get a message across in an un-selfconscious style. It's these small ideas and ways of looking at things, rather than the "grands projets" that makes Friedman interesting and worth a look at. For example, The Sesquipedalist's favourite piece is his leap into dog interpretation, extracted here. Maybe it's just me as a dog-lover, but these unfounded notes are a combination of the bizarre, touching and insightful, which pretty much sums up this "non-book".


Pro Domo (2006) by Yona Friedman
Actar
Hardback, 320 pages.






£17.00 from Amazon.co.uk here
$25.08 from Amazon.com here

2007-05-22 09:29:46 　　來自: 蒼間 (上海)

Yona Friedman: Pro Domo的評論

　 　西元前57年，古羅馬第一雄辯家西賽羅從流放地回到家鄉，發現他的宅第已被對手Publius Clodius拆毀，在原址建造了神廟。為了維護自己的權益，西賽羅發表了一篇雄辯演說“Pro Domo Sua” （為家園辯護），最終說服了長老院，拆除神廟，重建了他的家園。

　　“歸還”他人的家園，真正使得使用者成為其主人，使得建築盡可能的自主建造，這也正是Yona Friedman作為一個建築師，一個城市與人類的思考者，用其畢生事業來努力實現的人生理想。這本《為家園辯護——尤納•弗萊德曼》正是他在眾多領域所 做的眾多成績中隨意選取的片段。從這些不同時期不同研究的文章和圖像中，不難看出Yona Friedman對人類社會所賴以棲居的家園的熱愛與觀照，他從獨特的建築視角出發，用那些簡明的象形語彙、草圖模型等獨創工具，為我們建構出一個更加理 想，更加美好的生活世界，同時得以讓使用者重新成為家園的主人。而這也正是這本書借用西塞羅的演說“Pro Domo”作為本書書名的良苦意願。

　　早在上個世紀50年代，Yona Friedman提出的“移動建築”（Mobile Architecture）的設想就引起了建築界的廣泛爭論。隨著研究的深入，他不斷涉獵不同的領域，從社會學、經濟學、美學、物理學、心理學等諸多視野 審視建築的本質，並且對使用者的空間權益等問題提出可行性探討。他“由居住者決定住宅與城市規劃”的理念以及由此具象化生成的“空中城市”、“橋鎮”等計 劃，給當時的城市規劃帶來不小的震動，開啟了建築設計與城市規劃的新思路，更對今日的城市形成影響深遠。上世紀60年代出現的英國“建築電訊” （Archigram）和日本的“新陳代謝派”（Metabolism）都受其影響。

　　Yona Friedman現定居在法國巴黎，雖然已有83歲的高齡，但是依然充滿著令人驚異的各種奇思妙想。隨著老人閱歷的積澱，除卻那些早期那些極端民主化理念的延續，這本《Pro Domo》中更散發出睿智豁達意味深長的哲理光芒，久而彌篤。

　　誠然，如他本人所言，這本《Pro Domo（為家園辯護——尤納 弗萊得曼）》並不算是一本建築理論的“專著”，書中編集了他一生中不同時期的“零散思想片段”，甚至沒有選用他那些已經被廣為流傳的經典文章。同時因為 Yona是憑感性判斷來任意摘選的，這些不同時期寫就與發表的文章與圖像似乎聯繫不大。初讀此書，眾多陌生且鮮活的理論概念在腦海中不斷跳躍湧動，從二戰 廢墟到天空城市，從莫斯堡空間到大跨度結構，從粒子時空到第四產業，從蛋白質鏈到洲際城市等等，不得不讓人在驚歎其思維空間之廣博，並贊佩其理念的超前。 而當這些概念及其解釋逐漸清晰，彼此拼合，便顯現出一幅迥異于現世的人類生活世界的美好圖景。

　　本書開始的“自述”部分使我們初步瞭解Yona建築理念的發展歷程；隨後的“自我訪談”則更深入的闡述了“移動城市”、“空中城市”、“不確定性”等核心理念的架構與肇源；沿用這些理念，“城市”部分闡述其可變城市理論、“洲際城市”等概念，並描繪出未來城市的迷人景象；“普遍理論”則是從動物的視角出發，描述出另一種對於世界的詮釋，那是哲與詩；“舉措”部分則說明一種體現“自助建造”的輔助工具Flatwriter；在剖析今日建築師至上的社會經濟體制過程中，他用簡單的圖像語彙向我們講解了國際社會經濟運作過程，並指出“第四產業”的隱性能量，從而在“生存”章節裏驗證了自主建造的可能性；近些年來，Yona則致力於研發展示各種“不規則結構”在建築中的應用，將自主性建造形象化為各種不確定的即興的空間結構形態類型；沿用其“可變建築”以及“空中城市”理念，最後的“方案”部分是他在各個時期在各個地區所做的概念性設計方案。

　　 當我們終日沉迷於圖紙上的空間形態，執著於建築定勢的鞏固，或頂禮膜拜，或熱衷效仿，或逆來順受時，Yona也許正在牽著他的愛犬，散步於巴黎的某條小巷 中，而在他眼裏，100年後的城市風貌已然清晰。這位建築師，奇跡般的超然於當代建築主流思潮的喧囂之外，用一種簡單的智慧，提醒著我們切莫執著於建築的 “意義”而放棄了建築的“自由”，提醒著我們：基本框架建造+自主生活調整=生活世界（海德格爾所言的人類存在原點）。

　　如他所言，建築，其實更應該像每個人的“拿手好菜”，建築，其實更應該是親自動手的試錯過程。“試錯意味著有所為有所不為，意味著清規戒律越少越好，越不精確越好。事實上，這也就是“詩”的特性。”