By NIKLAS MAAK

The idea came to him suddenly on a cold January afternoon in his small apartment stuffed with architectural models and drawings and packing material and Indian fetishes and situated in an old building on the Boulevard Garibaldi in Paris. As the Metro Aérien from Montparnasse to the well-to-do 16e arrondissement thundered below us, we’d talked about Paris and about Berlin while Balkus, the very old dog, laid one paw over the other, and Florentine, the very old cat, wandered across the desk and tried to catch the line Yona Friedman had drawn in his notebook. How did he like the new Berlin, we’d asked him, and he’d replied, “Well …” Bit of a botched job. Unimaginative. It could have been done differently. So how could it have been done? “Send me an aerial photo and a few postcards,” Friedman had said, “and I’ll design you a new Berlin.”

Two weeks later, he landed in Berlin where he was opening an exhibition in the Galerie Aedes for the first time in quite a while and where collectors were already waiting in line to acquire one of the highly sought after original drawings that would be sold there in limited editions. The drawings he brought with him were done in the typical Friedman manner, urban utopias sketched into photographs: a floating, thickly woven carpet of buildings, a futuristic landscape of roofs that, infected by the tumbling forms of the chancellor’s residence, billowed over the bend in the Spree River to Potsdamer Platz and flooded the urban desert of Berlin Mitte with a typically Friedman-like swirl of freely hung apartments, cells for living in, swaying over a traffic-light-red grid-like structure.

Friedman’s new Berlin is, of course, an ideal construction that isn’t meant to be realized on a one-to-one scale – but this futuristic exaggeration has long been Friedman’s method to jumpstart the way cities are thought about. Ever since he became famous around the world for his ideas of a “mobile architecture” and a “ville spatiale” and became a forerunner to an entire generation of architects who drew up plans for high-density cities of the future in Asia as early as the ’60s, and built careers as “Metabolists,” Friedman has been concerned with spreading a thick interlocking and multi-layered living carpet across cities instead of blocks of apartment buildings; his constructions would avoid the melancholy of free-standing boxes as well as the sprawling development of the landscape with endless rows of individual houses.

Yona Friedman is the most famous and influential of all living architects who have built next to nothing in their own lifetime. A record of his projects that have actually been realized would barely fill two pages (a block of apartments in Haifa, a school in Angers in 1978, the Museum of Technology in Madra, India, in 1982), while the history of his admirers and imitators would fill several volumes.

But a good half-century ago, it looked as if Yona Friedman was destined to become an architect who would not be all that well known, but would nevertheless have plenty of commissions. Born in Budapest in 1923, Friedman joined a resistance group during WWII, escaped the hands of the Gestapo in 1944, and emigrated to Israel in 1946, where he studied architecture in Haifa at the Techunion. Friedman was caught up in the atmosphere of renewal in the newly founded nation. Everything seemed possible in Israel: Friedman designed buildings which in actuality were little more than sketches or patterns into which inhabitants were to build whatever they immediately needed, and he developed folding, flexible wall systems – all sorts of things the authorities had forbidden him when he built his first housing unit in Haifa in 1952. Friedman began to travel and soon realized that modern architecture was stuck in barren thought patterns, and so, in Dubrovnik, at the Congrès International de l’Architecture, he presented the concept of “mobile architecture.”

As opposed to what the name might suggest, this was no wild vision of cities wandering on legs of steel, the sort of thing Superstudio would invent later. Nor did it have anything to do with vacation houses plopped down by helicopters, as his colleague Buckminster Fuller envisioned. Instead, it was an architecture that was to adjust to given circumstances: a monumental grid in which individual living quarters could be hung like shelves in a bookcase, a structure that would incorporate the unforeseeable.

Friedman’s thinking was a revolution in architecture. If the classical modern architect was still a tyrannical demigod who pronounced from on high to inhabitants how they were to live (Mies van der Rohe even declared that the Venetian blinds in the Seagram Building were to be either completely open, half-open or lowered altogether for aesthetic reasons), Friedman held back as far as he could. His concept of the architect was of one who built open frameworks; as much freedom as possible was to reign within these frameworks and everyone could do what they wanted with the forms and materials of his or her choice.

Friedman’s hasty drawings, in which spectacular locations (the Champs-Elysées or, as with this assignment, the Band des Bundes, the government quarter of Berlin) are always flooded in spectacular ways with a “ville spatiale,” and have always ensured controversy. It would get too dark under these swaying cities, critics complained; this is sculpture, not architecture.

Others would prove that it could actually work – and this is the irony of the story, that Friedman was never allowed to build himself what wouldn’t have been even thinkable without him. Moshe Safdie’s towering cities at the Expo in Montreal in 1967 was an all but shameless reference to Friedman’s concept of a “ville spatiale” – and showed how well the Hungarian’s seemingly abstruse urban fantasies actually functioned. Instead of a monotonous skyscraper, Safdie stacked countless cubes, living spaces, one on top of the other – and the result was something that looked like an abstract Italian mountain village made of concrete. The postmodernists, with their rediscovery of city squares and niches owe Friedman and his apartment buildings sliced into a thousand pieces more than they would care to admit.

Friedman worked not only as an architect; among other things, he made animated films with his second wife Denise (one was awarded a Golden Lion in Venice in 1962), wrote a book about his dog and performed semiotic experiments – and for years, it seemed as if he’d been forgotten as an architect. But then Friedman surprised everyone with new installations – at the Biennale in Venice, for example, where he built a wild model city out of Styrofoam encasings for televisions and stereos, an architettura povera, a pulsating “Trash City” that looks like a forerunner to his vision of a dense inner city in Berlin.

For some time now, a rediscovery of the 80-year-old as a key figure of contemporary architecture has been underway. There is no idea between biomorphism and Rem Koolhaas’s theories of city building that doesn’t have some precedent in his work. The green skyscraper in which parks and public spaces are stacked up like a sandwich – an idea with which the MvRdV architects aroused controversy at the World Exhibit in Hanover in 2000 – was in the end nothing other than Friedman’s idea of a “Green Architecture” dating back to 1979. What the Deconstructivist Bernard Tschumi did in Tourcoing in France in 1996, namely, building over an old hall with a whirlwind of steel platforms, was nothing other than a small “ville spatiale.” Even Tschumi’s favorite term, “Superimposition,” can be found in Friedman’s 1956 manifesto, “L’Architecture mobile.”

But again, Friedman, who moved to France in 1957 and has been living in Paris ever since, didn’t build any of that. He preferred to move ahead to the forefront of what was architectonically imaginable, and many of his ideas were nothing other than futuristic mind games – like connecting all the continents with bridges, hundreds of meters long, and inhabited – but other projects predict current theories of urbanism. Early on, Friedman was interested in how urban structures take shape under the chaotic conditions of South American and Asian slums – and when Rem Koolhaas is lauded today for, among other things, his analysis of the anarchic urban sprawl in Lagos and China, then this view of favela culture owes something to Friedman as well. Since the late ’50s, he’d been traveling to the poorer quarters of the Third World and was commissioned by UNESCO to create entirely non-utopian proposals for a flexible favela architecture.

All that he brought from those trips, including thousands of drawings and hundreds of models, is now stored in the cellar of his apartment in Paris, an as yet unexplored archive of the architecture of the 20th century, though it’s currently being catalogued by the architecture theorist and gallerists Kristin Feireiss and Hans-Jürgen Commerell. One can only hope that this undiscovered universe of the great old futurist Friedman will soon come to light – because it’s not only Berlin that could learn from him that there can be more to a city than boxes of offices neatly stacked up next to each other.