Yona Friedman’s architectural thought, as presented in the MAXXI exhibition press kit, transforms architecture from an authored object into an open process of inhabitation, adaptation, and collective invention. His theory of Mobile Architecture, first formulated in the 1950s, begins from a decisive ethical inversion: the user, not the architect, is the central figure, because real inhabitants possess singular desires that cannot be reduced to the modernist fiction of the “average man” . The Ville Spatiale crystallises this proposition as an elevated grid above existing cities, within which residents may configure dwellings according to changing needs while leaving the ground largely intact. Yet Friedman’s case is not merely utopian: his Rod Net Structures, Gribouilli, Crumpled Sheets, comic-style manuals, and Museum of Simple Technology demonstrate how poor materials, improvisation, and accessible instructions can produce self-reliant spatial agency. The MAXXI exhibition itself becomes a case study in this democratic logic, incorporating a Street Museum of citizens’ objects and new visions of Rome and Zaha Hadid’s museum overlaid with mobile structures. Friedman’s “people’s architecture” therefore contests professional authority without dismissing expertise; the architect becomes a provider of instruments, recipes, and communicable images rather than a sovereign form-giver. Ultimately, his work proposes a realisable utopia in which architecture survives by becoming flexible, teachable, and socially porous: a civic art made not for inhabitants, but with and by them.