Ville Spatiale

Yona Friedman

Yona Friedman (1923–2020), hoop wire structural study, Ville Spatiale, 1958–1959. Wire, 180 × 600 × 600 mm. DMC 1500.

The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly every composition in space, heterogenous or regular ones.

Yona Friedman (1923–2020), wooden structural study, Ville Spatiale, 1928. Wood, 200 × 510 × 260 mm. DMC 1471.

In drawings of the ‘spatial city’ the models are composed at random. Without insisting on details such as facades, disposition of furniture, or particular forms of the volumes enclosed in the infrastructure. I left these details to the inhabitants. The ‘spatial city’ is not a ‘frozen form’ but it is rather, in my drawings and models, an ‘instant’ image which arises out of a long and indefinite process. Only an instant later, this instant image would already be different.

Domo, 1997