The cneai = is collaborating with the Maison de l’Île de France at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (CiuP) to pay tribute to Yona Friedman, the visionary architect who promoted the notion of the sustainable city and mobile architecture, by renaming its study room in his name. A singularity and avant-gardism in keeping with the image of the house, to which the cneai = has lent a series of drawings and offered posters from a second series of collages by the architect. The study room was named in homage to Yona Friedman. It was inaugurated in the presence of Francesco Torrisi, director of the maison, and Ann Stouvenel, director of cneai =.

As well as being a centre for research, production, residency and the dissemination of contemporary art, the cneai = is also bequeathed the Yona Friedman collection, which includes a number of the architect’s works: models, collages, drawings, archive documents and a work to be activated on the occasion of the Cité internationale’s centenary in 2025: the ‘Musée Sans Bâtiment’.

Yona Friedman, a leading figure in mobile architecture, reinvented urban architecture with his ‘feasible utopias’. He believed that architecture should minimise the use of resources and promote a sustainable approach. His vision is the same as that of the Maison de l’Île-de-France, the first positive-energy collective housing building of this size to be built in France from 100% solar energy and energy recovery.