Frei Otto (Architect and Engineer)
Introduction
Frei Paul Otto (Siegmar, today Chemnitz, Saxony, May 31, 1925 - Warmbronn, Leonberg, March 9, 2015)[1] was a German architect, structural engineer, professor and theorist. His extensive experience in construction, particularly tensile and membrane structures, such as the roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium for the 1972 Summer Olympics, has given him a place among the most significant architects of the century. Together with Vladimir Shukhov, Buckminster Fuller and Frank Gehry, he led the avant-garde in architecture of organic forms.
Inspired by nature and the processes found there, he looked for ways to use the least amount of materials and energy to enclose spaces. He practiced and advanced ideas of sustainability even before the word was coined. He was inspired by natural phenomena, from bird skulls to soap bubbles and spider webs. He spoke of the need to understand the “physical, biological and technical processes that give rise to objects.” Concepts derived from structures optimized from the 1960s to support large flat roofs. A lattice structure, such as that seen in Mannheim's Multihalle in 1974,[2] shows how a simple, easy-to-assemble structural solution can create a surprising and flexible space.[3].
Otto won the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2006 and received the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 2015. Shortly before his death, Otto was the second German architect after Gottfried Böhm to receive the world's highest architectural prize.[4].
Biography
Otto was born in Siegmar, Germany, and grew up in Berlin. He studied architecture in Berlin before enlisting in the Luftwaffe (Wehrmacht) as a fighter pilot in the final years of World War II. He was interned in a prisoner of war camp near Chartres (France) and with his training in aeronautical engineering,[5] the lack of material and the urgent need for accommodation, he began to experiment with tents as shelter.[6] After the war he studied briefly in the United States and visited Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Path
He began his private practice in Germany in 1952. In 1954 he obtained a doctorate in tensile constructions.[5] His armchair-shaped Music Pavilion, at the exhibition in the Federal Gardens of Kassel (Bundesgartenschau, BUGA) in 1955,[7] brought him his first share of fame. He later completed a doctorate in tensioned construction in 1954.