Interview with Yona Friedman | august 1st. 2007 | Paris| extract
IM:: anja steidinger + gerard cuartero-betriu
YF:: Yona Friedman
IM: is is posible to inhabit an idea?
YF: The difficulty is that there are not so many ideas, the problem is not the inhabit…
IM: Did you know Ricardo Bofill’s Walden7 and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat’67?
YF: Yes, a long time ago. I don’t know what he’s doing now. Safdie as well. Safdie was still a student and writing me, this was in the early sixties, to ask for my book of the mobile architecture for his thesis…You know, I met many people. Bofill, I knew as well, before he was…I knew so many of those people. I’m thinking it because of my age. The age differance was naturaly that they invited me. You are asking about Inhabit an idea: it is so evidently. You can take it simply in a symbolic sense that you can…the question slidly otherwise formulated that you can materialize your idea in order to inhabite. It’s a differance, because if you inhabite an idea that is not materialized then the word inhabite means something else… I want to show you something…it is that: I’m calling it the graffity museum and we made the first materialization in Italy and there will be an another one in Paris. The idea is very simple: you have some transparent plates as walls and people come and make their graffity after their idea. and so when the things is to be decided to be done nobody knows how it will look, nobody knows the shape…the same thing with this structure….its a technic that permits that people improvies on the spot, so they get some information how to do it and they do it. It’s like clay, you are transforming in what you want. So this is an answer to your question to inhabited an idea, that the idea is not clear in the heads of these people who do it.
IM: You said you give an alphabet or you give a gram to people who ask you to make a project and for example if theres is a question about the letter A, are you the kensei-contact, is there a comunication between you and them? How does it function?
YF: I’m sure it was perhaps not the good example with the alphabet. I can take anything we do. As an example: music. You hear it, you can not have it?…you hear it, as a hole, but it is written, it can be written down, not really, but quite aproximately on paper. So, I can give the way how you write it down, but the music is done by you. I can not do the music and there…I’m sorry…I’m not positioned, evidently, but I don’t think that any composer could do the music in a definate way. The maximum they could do is write it down very schematitly on paper, so that’s it, you know, I can write down the structures, but what will come out of the structures…that stays open.
IM: Within improvisation is there a moment of perfection?
YF: Yes, you know…I have a small personal proverb that intelligence starts with improvisation, it’s necessary. So, improvisation, generally, means much knowledge. You can improvise if you have a certain experience, and improvisation, I think, is the right way, and so architecture has to leave space for improvisation. I give always a very concrete, very common example, that is housing building 25m high. Now, in our mainstream architecture, the floor plan of the 25m floors is exactly the same, but if you enter in each apartment they are all different, because people improvise, even in this imposed uniformity, something diferent, and it can be very diferent and that’s the key. If you look buildings quite old, you will find that this happens. I was photographing in Xina and in India buildings built hundred fifty years ago by the colonising power and you can’t see anymore how is the building, they change so much that you don’t find even what was the original shape. Now, I would like that it should be not a process so dificult, but user could do, not in hundred years, but in ten months…like you do this furniture.
