Halfway between drawing and writing, Yona Friedman’s pictograms share a disenchanted vision of the democratic system and its imperfections. The use of two different colors allows the artist to dissociate two levels of reading, that of the image and that of the text, while maintaining a close dialectic between the two media.

A leading figure in prospective architecture, Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman (1923-2020) has been developing the concept of “mobile architecture” since the mid-twentieth century, the basis of a universal theory according to which housing and urban planning must be designed both directly by their users, and by integrating the unpredictability of future user behavior.
Considered one of architecture’s greatest thinkers, Yona Friedman sees utopia only as something achievable. His visionary projects are not only exhibited in leading international art institutions, but have also given rise to numerous real-world constructions, using simple, tried-and-tested techniques, and his proposals have had a major practical impact on contemporary urban planning.