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Visionary architect Yona Friedman has passed away

2020-02-21T13:12:00-05:00

Yona Friedman, the Hungarian-born French Jewish architect who helped develop the concept of "mobile architecture" in the 1960s and 70s, has passed away at age 96.

Friedman was born in 1923 and grew up during the Nazi era. Due to the fact that universities in Budapest had imposted strict admissions quotas against Jewish students at the time, Friedman was forced to acquire his architectural education though somewhat clandestine means. He sat in on classes and was never allowed to take exams, all the while receiving tutoring from other luminaries of the time, including the famous German physicists Werner Heisenberg. After fleeing Europe during World War II, he lived in Israel for a decade and then moved France, where he settled permanently and attained citizenship in 1966. During these years, Friedman developed some of his most potent ideas and proposals.

A vision of Friedman's Ville Spatiale. Image courtesy of Yona Friedman.

He is widely known for his imaginative paper architecture v...

Inside Yona Friedman's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

2016-06-08T15:16:00-04:00

At 93 years of age, Friedman is the oldest architect in the group. He took the opportunity to further explain the thinking that has propelled his life’s work, and the origin story behind the structure. The Summer House, Friedman explained, “was improvised from small models that I was putting together and it was reproduced. And for me the most important [thing was] that anyone could make this, and I made this experiment and it was built by children.”

Yona Friedman officially describes his ephemeral, elegantly 16mm steel-framed Serpentine Summer House as "a space-chain construction of 4 + 1 levels...composed of cubes defined by 6 circles of 1.85 metre in diameter" that rest upon the ground. It's "essentially a movable museum and exhibition."

Luckily, Archinect's very own U.K.-based correspondent Robert Urquhart, who covered this year's Serpertine Pavilion in depth, had the opportunity to speak with Friedman, who noted that “I think that architecture is first of all social, it has to be manageable, the interior is made by the inhabitant. An architect can invent the sculpture of reality.” For more of what Robert and Yona discussed, check out the piece in the link above!

Construction of Serpentine Pavilions begins

2016-05-13T05:30:00-04:00

Construction of the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion and Summer Houses has started. For the first time, the Serpentine Galleries has expanded its annual architecture programme to include four Summer Houses, located a short walk from the Gallery in Kensington Gardens, in addition to the 16th Pavilion on the Gallery lawn. For the fourth year running AECOM, in collaboration with David Glover, is delivering technical advisory services for the project...

This is the first year that the main Serpentine Pavilion – designed by BIG this time – will be accompanied by a series of smaller "summer pavilions." Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Khan have each designed a pavilion for the nearby Kensington Gardens.

The pavilions will open to the public in June.

Serpentine unzips Bjarke Ingels' Pavilion and 4 Summer Houses

2016-02-24T13:21:00-05:00

Bjarke Ingels' unfurling wall-based pavilion joins four summer houses—designed by Asif Khan, Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, and Yona Friedman—to create this year's Serpentine Architecture Program. Each of the four summer houses riffs on the adjacent Queen Caroline's Temple designed in 1734, while BIG's Serpentine Pavilion appears to have been inspired by the desire to, according to an interview with Ingels in the Standard, "use rationality and rigour to create the extraordinary out of the ordinary.”

“We’ve played with one of the most basic elements [of a building] — the wall,” Ingels explains. “Typically, walls are made from stacked identical elements. When you see it you can sense how it fits into our general way of thinking. We are playing with the idea of bigamy — you don’t have to choose between box or blob.”

According to the Serpentine Pavilion's website, Asif Khan's summer house was designed in part to mimic the Queen Caroline Temple's orientation toward the Serpentine Lake, ...

BIG to design 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, alongside smaller "Summer Houses" by Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Kahn

2016-02-10T15:29:00-05:00

The Serpentine Galleries in London announced earlier today the designer of the 2016 iteration of their annual Pavilion series: Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, the Copenhagen and New York-based global powerhouse.

This summer marks the 16th Pavilion of the acclaimed program, which began in 2000. Conceived initially by Julia Peyton-Jones, the outgoing co-director of the Galleries, the Serpentine’ Pavilion commission is awarded each year to noted architects who have never built in the UK.

As Peyton-Jones’ swan song, this summer’s program will be expanded to include four other 25 square meter structures, or “Summer Houses”, scattered on the lawns of Hyde Park in close proximity to the Galleries. These will be designed by Kunlé Adeyemi – NLÉ (Amsterdam/Lagos), Barkow Leibinger (Berlin/New York), Yona Friedman (Paris) and Asif Kahn (London).

Since its inception, the Serpentine Pavilion has drawn large crowds, garnering public attention for practitioners whose reputations had not necessarily exce...