Frei Otto

Frei Otto (born May 31, 1925, Siegmar, Germany—died March 9, 2015, Warmbronn, Germany) was a German architect and design engineer and winner of the 2015 Pritzker Prize, who is known for his tensile architectural designs—lightweight tentlike structures such as the central sports stadium of the Munich 1972 Olympic Games.

Otto was raised in Berlin. Both his father and his grandfather were sculptors, and Frei served as a stonemasonry apprentice in his father’s studio. He also built model airplanes and, as an adolescent, learned to pilot gliders. He was drafted into the German army in 1943 and served first as a pilot in the air force and later as a foot soldier. He was captured and became a prisoner of war (POW) in 1945 and remained in a French POW camp near Chartres for two years, serving as the camp architect. Working with a scarcity of construction materials, Otto learned how to design temporary structures at the camp with the bare minimum. He returned to Berlin in 1948 and studied architecture at the city’s Technical University. He spent 1950–51 in the United States, studying urban planning and sociology at the University of Virginia and visiting landmark architectural structures designed by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames. He returned to Berlin and in 1952 opened his own architecture practice there while he earned a doctorate in civil engineering (1954) at the Technical University of Berlin. His dissertation, The Suspended Roof, Form and Structure, was published in several languages.

In 1955 Otto collaborated with Peter Stromeyer (of the L. Stromeyer & Co. tent-making company) to create his first major lightweight tentlike design. The curved tented canopies, made from tension cables and stretched cotton, were used to create three temporary structures at the Federal Garden Exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Otto’s interest in an interdisciplinary approach to design led to the Biology and Building research group that he established in 1961 at the Technical University of Berlin, which cultivated cooperative projects between architects, engineers, and biologists. A few years later, in 1964, he was appointed full professor at the University of Stuttgart—a position he maintained through 1991—and founded the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design at the university, a cutting-edge architectural research and development centre.

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Architecture: The Built World

Otto’s first major international project was his design for the West German pavilion at the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal (Expo 67), created in collaboration with Rolf Gutbrod and Fritz Leonhardt. The large-scale fully enclosed structure—a design 10 years in the making—had a curvaceous overlapping series of membrane roofs made of steel mesh cable netting. The success of the Montreal design led to a commission for the main stadium of the 1972 Munich Olympics (with Gunther Behnisch). In the meantime, Otto opened the Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn architectural studio near Stuttgart in 1969 and in 1971 was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The Olympics stadium structure, for which Otto is best known, was a transparent version of his large trademark membranes that covered the sports arena and spectator stands. A fabric membrane covered the swimming pool, and a network of canopy membranes protected the spectators between event areas. Following his Olympics work, Otto made a number of tensile tentlike structures in places around the world, including the Intercontinental Hotel & Conference Centre in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (with Rolf Gutbrod; completed 1974), Tuwaiq Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (with Buro Happold and Omrania & Associates; completed 1985), the aviary at the Munich Zoo (completed 1980), and, with architect Shigeru Ban, the Japanese pavilion at the 2000 Expo in Hanover, Germany. He and Gutbrod won the 1980 Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Conference Centre, and he, Happold, and Omrania won that in 1998 for Tuwaiq Palace.

Otto edited and himself wrote much of several books on tensile structures and his particular brand of environmental architecture. They include Zugbeanspruchte Konstruktionen: Gestalt, Struktur und Berechnung von Bauten aus Seilen, Netzen und Membranen (1962; Tensile Structures), Biologie und Bauen (1971; Biology and Building), Gestalt Finden: Auf dem Weg zu Einer Baukunst des Minimalen (1995; Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal), and Occupying and Connecting: Thoughts on Territories and Spheres of Influence with Particular Reference to Human Settlement (2002). Otto was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Grand Prize of the German Association of Architects and Engineers, Berlin (1996), the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2005), and the Pritzker Prize (2015). Otto was notified about his selection for the Pritzker Prize before he died in 2015.