On the 21st of June the utopian architect of Hungarian origin Yona Friedman will celebrate in Florence the age of eighty, presenting his last book in Italian "Utopie realizzabili".

But, who is Yona Friedman? "A bit of madness in his ideas, the genius in his hands", a French journalist has recently written. "And vice versa".

Born in Budapest in 1923, Friedman has been living in Paris over fifty years. A controversial personality for long, because of his complex futurist visions, he exhibits now all over the world, and spreads his thought.
"I'm an architect, and many other things at the same time", Friedman says about himself. "It's difficult to have a good concept of architecture without a broad knowledge of sociology, economics, technology, and cultural bases in general, off course, which define aesthetics. Creating, in architecture, is the same as looking over".
It's difficult too to mention all that Friedman realized, because the best things of his extraordinary life are especially theoretical creations, daring visions of an extremely complex mind, "unfeasible utopias", we could say in spite of the title of his last book.
In the Fifties, besides signing a series of projects in the field of council-house building, in Israel, Friedman also took part in the competition for the Pompidou Centre, in Paris.
In 1958, he published his first manifesto: "Mobile architecture". The mobility in question is not the mobility of the building, but the mobility of the user, who claims a new freedom. "The building is mobile in so much as any sort of use whatsoever by the user or a group must be possible and realisable", Friedman explains. Mobile architecture is thus the "dwelling decided on by the occupant" by way of "infrastructures that are neither determined nor determining".
In 1979, Friedman accepted the appointment of planning the Bergson Lycée in Angers, France. A fully new experience, since the Ministry of Education had promised to the teachers and the students' parents to build the school as they had conceived it. "My task was to coordinate everything and check the budget was respected. There were some objections, but the teachers rallied to defend the project, the Ministry held out and the Bergson Lycée is still working.
In 1987, he completed the "Museum of Simple Technology" in Madras, India, which implements principles of self-construction based on local materials such as bamboo.

In the occasion of his visit in Florence, the master of architectonic thought will tell a qualified audience of critics, journalists, architecture fans and students all these experiences and his "feasible utopias".
Starting from the idea it's not possible to foreseen what kind of aspect the town will assume, and the observation that the top theoretical systems revealed themselves to be unfeasible, Friedman theorizes the town - or the "feasible utopia" - as the result of individual actions carried into effect by the people. In other words, Friedman suggests a town built by its inhabitants themselves, a town as malleable as possible, the set up of which can change exactly as the use of spare time and space change.

After the event "Il Principe e l'Architetto" - with Norman Foster of Foster and Partners and the McLaren President and CEO Ron Dennis as excellent speakers - the meeting with Yona Friedman is the second appointment of the "Osservatorio sull'Architettura", the cycle of lectures devised by Targetti in order to investigate the beneficial interdisciplinary synergies between architecture, communication, art, sociology.