From the Smithson’s Berlin to Friedman’s Paris: photomontages for an undisclosed travel diary

Abstract

The disappearance of Yona Friedman has once again placed his work at the center of the architectural debate. The critical review of The Spatial City, his main life project, places it, ironically, as a prelude to a new paradigm that will call for the disappearance of architecture and its replacement by hyper[1]technological networks that enable a changing life in a "well-tempered” environment —following the trends of the moment. However, this review is still accommodated in relating The Spatial City with the referential world accepted by Friedman himself: Le Corbusier, Metabolists, Konrad Wachsmann... This article expands this context by going beyond the author’s writings and deliberately comparing little known images of his Ville Spatiale with other images realized by those with whom he always denied any relationship: Alison and Peter Smithson. It is in an unrecognized intellectual struggle with these, where the research aims to place Friedman's photomontages as a means of transmitting the ideas that years later were taken to the extreme by a new generation of "radical architects" —especially in London, Vienna and Florence— but recognizing the fundamental role —often overlooked by architectural criticism — that the British couple had in its founding.