On 31 May, the German engineer, architect and inventor Frei Otto would have been 100 years old. The monograph ‘Frei Otto, 1925-2025: Building with Nature’, edited by Joaquín Medina Warmburg and Anna-Maria Meister, is being published by Prestel to mark the Pritzker Prize winner's milestone birthday.
Was he an engineer, architect, landscape planner, artist or researcher? If you had to categorise this free spirit, who transcended every discipline, it would probably be inventor.
© saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau | Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Exceptional talent
Frei Otto was an exception in every respect. It starts with the first name his mother gave him, as this was her motto in life. Both parents were members of the Werkbund, and the son, born in 1925, initially wanted to become a sculptor, but studied architecture in Berlin - interrupted by the war.
Project Study‘City in the Arctic’ 1971, Visualization of the climate shell for the City in the Arctic, model photo © saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau | Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Light structures
As a passionate glider pilot, he was enthusiastic about lightweight construction and wrote his doctoral thesis on ‘The hanging roof’. He founded an office in Berlin and in 1957 the first ‘Development Centre for Lightweight Construction’. At the same time, he researched the principles of nature and how these could be transferred to particularly lightweight constructions. In 1964, he founded the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart, which still exists today. Since he designed the German Pavilion at Expo 67’, Frei Otto is no longer unknown. And with the wide-span roofs over the Munich Olympic site in 1972, which he developed together with Günter Behnisch, he finally ascended to the architectural Olympus.
City in the Antarctic (1953), design sketch © saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau | Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Pritzker honour and 100th birthday
Otto rightly received the Pritzker Prize in 2015, but died shortly before the official award ceremony, making him an exception here too: It is the only Pritzker Prize awarded posthumously. Normally architects who are still alive are awarded for their life's work.There are already plenty of books on this outstanding architectural thinker. To mark his 100th birthday, however, the saai Archive for Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where Otto's work archive is located, has now set out to present a new and brilliant overview of his thinking and work. You can tell from the 256-page tome that the Otto experts were responsible for it.
Frei Otto on the gridshell of the German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal (1966) © saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau | Karlsruher Institut für Technologie
Models, experiments, constructions
In 19 contributions, topics relating primarily to his research into nature and its application to models, calculations and experimental constructions are presented, as well as individual projects; From the aforementioned Olympic Park and Expo Pavilion to the Multihalle in Mannheim and the eco-houses in Berlin to a church in Berlin, Otto's own studio in Warmbronn and a diplomatic club in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which the internationally well-connected Otto developed with the American firm Sprankle, Land & Sprague and the British engineers from Buro Happold.
This comprehensive, eloquent and lavishly illustrated overview is rounded off by two discussions between the editors and architecture professors Jan Knippers, Achim Menges and Ferdinand Ludwig on the current relevance of Otto's pioneering achievements for today's topics such as bionics, lightweight construction and ecological building.
The book will be published on 26 March 2025, just in time for Frei Otto's centenary on 31 May 2025.
Text: Florian Heilmeyer
Joaquín Medina Warmburg, Anna-Maria Meister (eds), „Frei Otto, 1925–2015. Building with Nature, Hardcover, 24,0x28,7 cm, 256 pages, 255 colour illustrations Prestel, Munich, New York 2025, ISBN: 978-3-7913-7750-6
