Moon River comenta en About Cities el trabajo del “visionary architect and artist” Yona Friedman y sus dibujos de la serie Spatial City (1958) [los enlaces e imágenes que aparecen aquí proceden del post de Moon River. Yona Friedman – Utopies Réalisables es un blog dedicado a la obra de este arquitecto húngaro].
En el libro de Larry Busbea dedicado a las utopías urbanas en Francia, Topologies. The urban utopia en France, 1960–1970, se analiza el trabajo de un grupo de “urbanistas” que, desde diferentes disciplinas, analizaron las ciudades como procesos espaciales, gobernados por la configuación de las infraestructuras, a partir de los que construyeron sus propias utopías. No casualmente este movimiento adquirió su máxima actividad en Francia en los años previos y posteriores al mayo de 1968. Yona Friedman fue el más conocido representante del movimiento de los “urbanistas espaciales”:
Amid the cultural and political ferment of 1960s France, a group of avant-garde architects, artists, writers, theorists, and critics known as "spatial urbanists" envisioned a series of urban utopias, phantom cities of a possible future. The utopian "spatial" city most often took the form of a massive grid or mesh suspended above the ground, all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine. In this new urban world, technology and automation were positive forces, providing for material needs as well as time and space for leisure…
The projects of the spatial urbanists were in large part a response to the government’s planning policies, its Kafka-esque bureaucracy, and its outdated institutions, which they considered the first obstacles to the implementation of their radical urban designs. But even though the spatial city was conceived as progressive, by the end of the 1960s some critics had begun to question its ideological foundations.
Topologies maps the literal and metaphorical topologies of spatial urbanism, describing and documenting its projects and locating it within an international network of experimental architectural practice that also included the Situationist International, Archigram, the Metabolists, Architecture Principe, Superstudio, and others.
Even at its most fanciful, Busbea argues, the French urban utopia provided an image for social transformations that were only beginning to be described by cultural theorists and sociologists. The designs of spatial urbanism anticipated the ambivalence that would greet the arrival in France of capitalist modernity and globalization, marking both the apex and the end of the technological optimism of the postwar years.
Como en muchas ocasiones, la utopía, en este caso aún no realizada, parece adquirir la forma de una distopía totalitaria: “all of its parts (and inhabitants) circulating in a smooth, synchronous rhythm, its streets and buildings constituting a gigantic work of plastic art or interactive machine”. Paradójicamente un movimiento que surge en respuesta a la planificación urbana idea un nuevo modelo planificador que, posiblemente, de ser llevado a la práctica se distinguiría muy poco del original al que pretendían criticar. Ambos se olvidaban de un elemento crucial: el estricto orden es incompatible con la creatividad y con la actividad libre de los ciudadanos. Planificar un orden estricto, como aquel que representa un “smooth, synchronous rhythm” significa acabar con la capacidad de innovación e imaginación de una sociedad.
En el catálogo del MoMA se pueden encontrar muchos de los dibujos de Yona Friedman. Además, editado por Matilda McQuaid, publicaron en 2002 Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art. Paola Antonelli, en este publication excerpt presenta una visión alternativa de Friedman y los urbanistas espaciales, como críticos del modernismo y defensores de la participación activa de los usuarios en la configuración de la ciudad:
Born and schooled in Budapest, active in Haifa until 1957 and later in Paris, Yona Friedman, like many of his contemporaries, has concentrated on the scale of the city as it has evolved. His proposed ideal architecture is open in character, as this drawing for his Spatial City Project shows. The Spatial City is a unit that can be repeated ad infinitum. All of the structural elements connected to the individual user, such as walls, floor slabs, and partitions, are radically mobile, and the architecture deliberately avoids committing itself to any particular style or pattern of use. Versatile and free as Friedman's composition is, however, it is contained by a superior order, on which it relies: the wide grid of pillars and slabs on which it stands. Friedman called this grid the "spatial infrastructure," and designed it for collective use. The user's determination was to play as important a role in it as the architect's: "Mobile architecture looks for techniques which don't impose a preconceived plan. . . . It is the user who makes the project with a potential 'designer's participation.'" The design of Friedman's ideal city is only perfected in its use.
The concept of mobile architecture was Friedman's contribution to the tenth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in Dubrovnik in 1956. It was during this session of the congress that modernism was famously called into question as an outdated, static scheme inappropriate for new global realities. Friedman's concept highlighted the relationship between social dynamics and architecture in the proto-postmodern world, and suggested to architects how they could include that relationship in their thinking about the future.
¿Qué visión es correcta?. El ritmo sincronizado o la arquitectura abierta configurable por el usuario. ¿Son ambos procesos compatibles?. Posiblemente la respuesta a esa supuesta paradoja esté en el diseño deliberado de “a superior order, on which it relies” o, trasladado a elementos tangibles, la “spatial infrastructure”. Podríamos preguntarnos si es posible la libertad de decisión (y que tipo de libertad) dentro de una superestructura o ésta es en realidad un modo sutil de control por el diseño. Quizás las respuestas a estas preguntas sólo sean un entretenimiento para intelectuales ociosos o, quizás, ayuden a entender com funcionan realmente los grupos sociales y cuál fue el papel del mayo del 1968, un tema que se ha puesto en primera línea del debate últimamente.
