CONVERSATION WITH YONA FRIEDMAN

Paris, November 23, 2014 and January 21, 2015

By Valerio Franzone and Laura Villa Baroncelli

(Photographs by Laura Villa Baroncelli and Manuele Geromini)

on “RV Rendez-Vous de la Mode” № 9 1017 (paper and www.rendezvousdelamode.com/yona-friedman)

US

Modernity was supposed to offer humanity a new era, a world made of order and beauty, where everything could be mapped and determined. We believed in science and progress and the possibility of absolute freedom. But something went wrong and the meta narratives we built collapsed with the post modernism. What do you think happened, Mr. Friedman?

YONA FRIEDMAN

All of the social projects are realized very very far from reality, because people do not necessarily behave as the planners imagined. It is unpredictable how people could react to a project, and that's why I am very much against planning: you know planned economy, planned society, planned behaviour... they simply don't work.

I believe we are living in what I would call an erratic world, where everything depends on randomness and improvisation. I meet something unexpected and I improvise doing something unexpected relying on my very capabilities. The other party reacts, and so on.

Like animals do.

You know, I had a dog: I was unpredictable for it, and it behaved instinctively. I reacted as I needed and it worked fine.

So what went wrong was that the planners thought that everything would have gone as planned. But, as a matter of fact, it didn't.

We trusted too strongly in our plans.

US

So the mistake was our desire of a wide-spread planning…

YF

You see, for me the Bauhaus is the typical example of this absurdity. They were always imagining that what they calculated was the best for the users, not realizing that people actually wanted something else. Take for example their project of an ergonomic kitchen… interesting, maybe, but housewives didn’t want the ergonomic kitchen!

US

It's always hard to communicate and comprehend someone's needs...

YF

I think you can understand a lot from the animal behaviour. I have learned quite a lot from my dog. I have been living with this “four-legged extraterrestrial being” and it led me to a very simple truth: human beings are all sharing the fallacy of believing that communication is based on pure language.

Dogs don't have a language and yet they can communicate. So there has to be some other way.

I had interesting conversations with some biologists about that and they confirmed me that we have the same capabilities of dogs in non-verbal communication, but we just neglected them.

When you enter a volume - and this, for architects, is a very evident example – you don't need to look at the ceiling to perceive it. You feel it, even if you don't look at it. That is a clear demonstration that we have many more senses than we think. It's just that we privilege certain of them.

US

Do you think that the non-verbal communication is the game-changer? Is this the reason why a small group, is capable of working better?

YF

Yes, that's one of the reasons. You know, animal groups are limited in size because they have to preserve a non-verbal communication. You will never see a group of a thousand elephants, it is impossible. Elephants groups are composed - I don't know - by 50 of them, no more, and for each species there is a definite size.

So it's obvious that when I spoke about the “critical group size” (the critical group is “the biggest set of elements -human beings, objects, bonds- in which the good performance of a structured organisation, can still be guaranteed”) I considered it as a biological fact - a praxis.

But this is not the only reason. In a small group people can improvise. A hundred million people can't, and even if they try it it’s every time catastrophic.

US

Why improvisation should it work better in a small group?

YF

In a small group it's just easier because in a large group a leader will immediately impose himself, everyone will follow the leader and nobody will improvise anymore.

You know, also in architecture what I propose is improvisation, but for architects architecture has always been like “something hard, made to last for eternity”. On the contrary I think that it can be improvised and that planning is pretentious.

US

So... is improvisation the wisest way to act?

YF

I'll try to make an example. I'm now realizing several constructions all around the world, but I'm not going there. I cannot easily travel. Thus, I explain to them how it has to be done and they improvise it on the spot.

People on the spot simply know what to do. I cannot decide for them in advance, I just can't: if I'm on the spot, I can participate in this improvisation, but if I'm not....

US

It's not necessarily easy to accept...

YF

No, indeed. When I presented the idea of the Ville Spatiale for the first time, people couldn't accept that it had no facade. But it can’t, because my idea is that the facade is meant to evolve through the improvisation of the inhabitants... certainly far from Mies van der Rohe and his Chicago building for which he also prescribed the curtains people had to install.

When it came out the competition of the Centre Pompidou, I proposed a Ville Spatiale's project, but they asked me for a facade and I had no facade! I could design 20 different facades, but it was not allowed by the competition rules... but, you know... nowadays people are blocked. In every field of professionals, architects, politicians, engineers... everyone. They are all blocked on some idea, and they can't see that things are not necessarily as they believe they were. Mainstream architects don't like the idea of improvisation, young architects and students like it: for them the possibility of improvising is an adventure.

US

You said before that the critical group size is a biological fact. Can we calculate it for the human species?

YF

Yes, we can calculate it. This is very theoretical, but it is important effectively. With experiments we found that it is around 12 and that it can't go much higher. So it immediately becomes clear, for example, why a parliament is absolutely not going to work: it's too large. In the old days governing bodies were normally “the Council of 10” or “the Council of 12” because this is the size that works, but if you exceed it there will be short-circuit.

US

Why?

YF

The point is the consensus. We need to preserve the possibility of a non-verbal communication because languages are not really appropriate. You cannot communicate a concept, it's impossible. You can describe it, you can turn around it... Maybe telepathy, if it had existed, could have been able to transfer a concept, but through language it's practically impossible.

So, even in a small group, you will not be able to transfer a concept but, at least, you will be able to achieve some level of consensus and that's important because, you know, all these questions about ideology... they are abstractions: they are not real.

Once I was asked about how I would define freedom. I answered that, in my opinion, there's no freedom: there is a “freedom to speak”, there is a “freedom to eat”, there is a “freedom to walk”. Freedom itself is nothing more than an abstraction, “freedom to speak”, instead, is a very distinct thing. “Freedom to go away from somewhere” is clear and concrete, while freedom... it was a divinity of the Roman mythology: it is vague and symbolic.

US

Reality is concrete.

YF

Absolutely. You know, utopias are personal and, even in a small group, it could happen that we find consensus only on a very specific project or behaviour. Consensus is always connected with the opinion of every member of the community on a specific situation and we cannot force it or plan it, because it would work in the wrong direction.

So imagine the advent of democracy, it is completely fallacious because democracy is consensus, and we will never be able to achieve a 500 million Europeans' consensus.

In my very opinion the European Union should be made of City-states. I was writing about it in the 60s…

All the major cities, the regions, are political entities and that they can cooperate. In 1980 I had to write down a report for the Council of Europe and I stated that Europe should have been a Union of City-states – 150/200 City-states because Utopias are made of individuals and that these individual Utopias can be consensual only in small groups. The General Secretary of the Council of Europe pointed out that those ideas were my ideas, and not the ideas of the Council of Europe, but they published it.

US

You are usually defined as a visionary...

YF

I always avoided this term. I’m a realist, this was a journalistic invention and it’s not my language. I very much trust in realism and, for me, it's not some philosophical concept: all the animals are realist. Reality is tactile, it’s our experience.

Quantum physics can, maybe, see otherwise, but quantum physics, for me, is no more than a mental construction.

I have no visions except for what is realizable: all of my projects can be realized. They were indeed realized. There are no doubts, there is an idea lying underneath, but that's not visionary, it's concrete.

I never liked what is vague and unrealisable. It can be poetic, but that’s another thing.

I work at a very tangible craftsman level: I know how to do these things, I know what to expect, and I accept to be surprised by the result.

I am not a visionary.

Terrorists are visionary: they are utopians.

US

Terrorists are visionary?

YF

There is a lot of talk about people joining the Jihad, but that's commonly misinterpreted: they are not joining any ideology. It's like when there was the Foreign Legion in France. They are young people looking for some adventure. Of course they don't call it “adventure”, because they live it as a real and tangible experience, but all these young political militants, they are not really interested in politics. They are interested in the operation of being a militant and that's a very big difference.

So I think, indeed, that we take our abstract ideas as realities but they are not. And it is very demanding for us to see them as something abstract.

US

But even if these ideas are abstract, sometimes they could have very concrete consequences...

YF

You know... I think the problem is that contemporary society doesn’t admit action.

People are allowed to think but no to act, and this is something that could easily drive someone crazy. I think, for example, that terroristic attacks could be seen as a symptomatic reaction to this impossibility to act.

A solution would be to understand how to liberate the action before getting mad, and act within rationality. But in our social system there seems to be no room for this, being that our democracy is sought-action based. Designating a delegate is not an action at all. You can't tell him what to do. You cannot express your emotion.

And, in a way, the same happened in the last mass demonstration (after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Ed.). A demonstration of 4,000,000 human beings could eventually be the expression of a common emotion, but you cannot consider it as a real action.

Action, in my opinion, can only come when it involves an individual choice within a smaller group.

Look, for example, when that person in the kasher store saved, all alone, all of those hostages. That was real freedom. That is the real self-government.

US

Do you think self-governance is the failure or the natural evolution of the welfare state?

YF

In my idea any state should always be a welfare state, because there's no other justification for a state to exist. The problem is that nowadays the States work in the wrong way, and self-government can be identified as the behaviour of the individual against the government caste.

But self government itself is nothing more than an idea and it does not necessarily mean freedom of acting. In fact we can find it in several different variations, likewise the citizen who evades taxes, which avoids discussion with other people, and tries to bypass them. That's also self-government.

And there is another problem. Each of us can be a self-government. The matter is that, most of the times, we are incapable of acting or, at least, we think so.

Maybe, sometimes, you even tried to act, but you couldn't perceive any consequences. You saw something, you said something, you called the authorities but they couldn't act either, because we have designated a huge amount of responsibilities to a juristic and legal system which can't produce any real action. We have created a system of blockage that has generated depression and frustration.

I know it’s idiotic as an example, but the very primitive reaction when somebody made you angry was to punch him. It was barbarous but it was direct.

And the real problem is that we haven’t found a replacement yet, it will probably take a long long time.

It should start from primary school. Kids should be allowed to react and learn not to react brutally.

Instead, the institutions try to repress their instinct and species behaviour, and I have a very pessimistic feeling about this.

US

So, do you think there is actually any good way to react?

YF

As I told you, I had a dog... Later a cat came. When the dog saw it for the first time his reaction was to attack it, and the cat's reaction was to hide on the top of the cupboard. Then time passed. The cat stopped hiding and the dog got used to its company. No one told him “This is our cat, you ought to be friends”, there was no need, it simply understood.

You should always be able to endorse a diplomatic behaviour over a belligerent one. The problem is that, nowadays, negotiation is constrained by the juridical system, by the communication system, and, strangely enough, by internet too.

US

Internet can certainly be ambiguous...

YF

Misleading and catastrophic because it is just a technical mean, and it is frequently misunderstood.

Most of the people just spend their time sending messages and writing posts all over the net, convinced they are spreading their ideas to millions of users, and not realizing that, as a matter of fact, they can just reach a handful of acknowledgers they could have simply called by phone, enjoying a deeper and more satisfying communication.

US

Getting back to belligerent behaviours, we inevitably think about the recent attacks which summoned back the fear and uncertainty we felt after the attack of the 9/11. In 2001 you reacted to those events with the Mosquito Net project…

YF

You know, now I have no idea what to do, because anything anyone could do against that individual action would generate aggressiveness. The Mosquito Net proposal was conceived as a passive defensive reaction, like when the Resistance in WWII counterfeited documents to fight deportations.

When I was in the army I worked with the Defence building fortifications to preserve people from being killed: Mosquito Net was basically a defence act against individuals. It was a very difficult choice, because common attitude would have been “Okay... if you fear somebody that comes against you... smash them".

US

But don't you think it could be an instinctive reaction?

YF

You know, fear is part of any animal species. A little child already deals with fears, because it is a self-defence tool. What matters is how it evolves.

I learned what fear was in the 30s-40s, during the German occupation.

The common reaction to fear - one of the possible reactions - was the Resistance: this one in particular was what, in a deformed way, all the aggressive people would have done. Everyday something happens somewhere, somebody punches someone else... I know it’s completely mad but that's how it goes: fear produces aggressive reactions.

Any scared animal shows aggressiveness, also humans, even if that's against our ideal image of how we have to be, with no fear there’s no aggressiveness...

I think we neglect too much our species properties. Culture is wonderful we invented technology, we invented cities, we invented agriculture... but we also destroyed the environment, we introduced poverty and frustration... and all because we are working against the rules of our species.

For example, we are the only specie who uses exchange: other animals eat what they need and they leave everything else for the others. On the contrary we accumulate and then exchange and that was a mistake since the very beginning, because - ironically - instead of solving problems, it created new ones.

US

Do you think that modern technology too could be one of the causes of these new problems?

YF

I'm not against modern technology, I use it like everybody else, but I'm against relying too much on it. That's different.

I’m against the programmed obsolescence, one of the most typical traps of our economy. They say that its absence would be a cause of unemployment but I think it’s definitely false. If there hadn't been obsolescence, the logical consequence would have been a need for repairers and workplaces in repairing could have been more than the ones in production.

Nowadays there are more unemployed workers than automobiles in the streets...

US

It's never easy to find a solution that really brings some change...

YF

That reminds me of something funny that happened in 1976, during the first Habitat conference in Canada.

The Prime Minister of Canada declared: "There is a way to save the environment: we have to learn loving other people". So I told him that it was a nice and very old idea, but if it didn't get through in 5 thousand years, it wouldn't have done it during a conference.

You know, it is always difficult to propose concrete solutions and not mere empty words...

US

Along with fear and aggressiveness, which you introduced before, depression is probably the mental disorder that mostly characterized the Modern Era. Some elements - likewise the lack of communicability amongst people, the paralysis of a sustainable political, social and economical progress, and the consequent trustlessness in a future that people can’t feel they are actually creating - are increasing this disorder more and more.

The modernist city has apparently been working in the very same direction as it is a strongly rationalized place, deprived of any structural randomness. It was designed neglecting many of the emotions and passions of its inhabitants, obtaining a specialized, rigid and determined space that was not meant to surprise them. It’s a space that can't be modified by its inhabitants, and - as a consequence – that can't establish any identity relation with them.

What do you think could be the reaction to this situation?

Which future do you predict for our cities?

YF

In the past the city was a solution.

There was a limited group: I had neighbours, I was going to the shops, I had face to face relationships, and it worked. It was civilization, modern civilization, and it meant that if I was walking down the street and I ran into somebody, even if they didn't like me, I didn't have to fear to be killed. It is what Kant defined as the categorical imperative using a bureaucratic expression, and what Lao Tze, several thousand years before, explained in a much simpler not bureaucratic but very factual way: there is a baby who falls in the water and everybody who passes by stops and tries to save them.

The city as an institution was based on this: it was a tribal invention, a tribe living together.

Now we are still living in a tribe, but the tribe is surrounded by a large neutral city with which the contact is absent or very superficial. The tribal city trained me to avoid aggressiveness, but the city became, in time, over-bureaucratized and now it has nothing to do with people.

And something very similar happened with our economy. You cannot even escape it because all kinds of objects are made by someone else, and I'm not speaking necessarily about the high-technological devices: I am not even capable of crafting my own glasses, even if they are not so complicated to make.

I cannot build the tools I need, because to manufacture them I would need other tools I don't have. So we've got prohibitive technical structures which make any individual action impossible and "bandit groups" – like the banks and the religious extremists - that exploit this situation. We have no defences against them, and it’s not because it is impossible but because we have been brain-washed to think it is useless to try.

In the 60s I was using the term “urban village” about this tribal reality. The urban village is "my reality". They could say I am living in a city of 10 million inhabitants but, as a matter of fact, I'm living in my little urban village where I can walk down the streets and say hello to the people I meet. The point is that the organization of the economy and property, in this urban village, is not determined by a physical space but behaviourally.

So I think that the answer to your question is that the future of our cities should be based on letting improvisation act as far as it can on the physical space, which was my idea of the Ville Spatiale: multiply the ground surface and let the inhabitants do whatever they want and freely organize themselves.

However this is very unlikely to happen because people are too strongly bonded to a bureaucratic thinking.

For example, some years ago, the Centre Pompidou bought one of my large models but it got broken during the shipping. So I told them that it was not a problem as I was still living and I could very easily re-make it. They replied to me “Yes, but it will not be as it was in the photographs of the '62 or '63”. Thus I told them that Architecture Mobile means that it's not fixed in a precise situation, but they didn't understand it...

US

This is what you call bureaucratic thinking.

YF

To be honest bureaucratic thinking has some positive sides too, like giving to ordinary people the possibility to rely on their legal rights. But the problem is that right is a bureaucratic concept that comes, of course, from a long philosophical reasoning and that it is actually based on old legal texts. This is an evident example of the contradictions of our civilization: all the institutions were designed for a reality long since obsolete, but we cannot change them, because people are used to them and no new models have been proposed as a replacement yet.

This is the same thing that happened when I couldn't define what should have been the facade of the Ville Spatiale. The bureaucratic thinking can't accept any new concept because the new concept changes terminology... the facades become meaningless and the same happens with the planning.

US

This incapability of comprehending the new concept can block the change and thus the action.

YF

It doesn't matter how long it takes for the change to happen, what is important is that the action is not blocked, like in the small scale architecture in which people are used to live with non-definitive plans.

We can dispose the furniture in this room as we want... it will maybe take a long time to get used to it but we can do it, we can change things. Instead if we were forbid to act, as I said before, it would make us mad, depressed, or aggressive... You know, if you let dogs go their own way they will feel quite free, but if you jam them into one room they will become aggressive and start fighting... and we are in this same absurd situation.

US

One last question: Suppose, Mr. Friedman, this interview were to be read by our descendants like a Dead Sea scrolls, in a thousand years’ time. What would you think it’s worth telling to that generation about the life you've lived and the lessons you've learned from it?

This question was originally proposed to Bertrand Russell in 1959 during a BBC show titled Face-to-Face and we'd appreciate to ask you the same question.

YF

It is interesting because the Dead Sea Scrolls, well they happen to be divided in small pieces, thus you can put them together in one way, and you can put them together in the exactly opposite way...

That's really one of the problems they have and now I have the same problem too: I digitalized my archives and they will be available for different institutions but I am absolutely sure that every statement can be misunderstood. And it can't be done differently. I read other people's statements and, even if I know the fallacy of communication, I misunderstand them.

That's what I was speaking about when I said that concepts can't really get through by language.

You know, it's like our archaeologists who find ancient artefacts and they have no idea what they mean, so they try to interpret them. It's a game, it's like a detective movie: who was the criminal?

The past is fortified not because of lack of traces but for how you interpret the traces.

I have been insisting for many years on this concept: large scale communication and communication in general, is impossible, and not because of the technical reasons, the channels exist, but because the interpretation cannot be transferred.

So, you know, communication is important because it’s a system of misleading.