Frei Otto Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Frei Otto (1925-2015) was a German architect, engineer and researcher and the leading pioneer of lightweight and tensile structures. Through experiments with soap films, chains and models he developed cable nets, membranes and gridshells that use the least material to cover the largest spaces, from the German Pavilion at Expo 67 and the roofs of the Munich Olympic Park to the timber Multihalle in Mannheim. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2015, the day after his death was announced.

Chemnitz, the war and Berlin

Otto was born in Siegmar, near Chemnitz, in 1925, the son of a sculptor. He trained as a stonemason, served as a pilot in the Second World War and was held as a prisoner of war in France, near Chartres, where he worked as the camp’s architect. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and wrote his doctorate on suspended roofs (1954).

Research into lightweight structures

In 1957 he founded a research centre for lightweight construction in Berlin, and in 1964 he became head of the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart. There he studied natural forms, from soap bubbles to spider webs, as models for efficient structures.

Pavilions, stadiums and gridshells

With Rolf Gutbrod he designed the German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, a cable net tent. With Günter Behnisch and partners he engineered the vast acrylic and cable net roofs of the Munich Olympic Park (1972). The Multihalle in Mannheim (1975), designed with Carlfried Mutschler, is a timber gridshell, and in 2000 he worked with Shigeru Ban on the paper tube Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover.

Recognition

Otto received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2006. He died in Leonberg in March 2015, shortly before the announcement that he had been awarded the Pritzker Prize.