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| Frei Otto’s German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Photo: Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn |
He was the hero of groundbreaking lightweight architecture, inspiring everything from the Millennium Dome to pleasure-domes in Kazakhstan and service stations all over the world. But why didn’t Otto achieve the socially-driven dream he always hoped for?
The Google campus proposed for Mountain View, California, by Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, could come straight from the 1970s sketchbooks of groundbreaking German engineer and grand master of the big tent, Frei Otto, who died on Mar 9, 2015, Warmbronn, Germany.
The news of his death became all the more poignant with the announcement that he was to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, the world’s highest accolade for architecture, later same year. Thankfully Otto had already learned of the news, which he greeted with characteristic modesty: “I have never done anything to gain this prize” he said. “I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.”
For a man who set out to “design new types of buildings to help poor people,” his work mainly became associated with the grand swooping gestures of expos and trade fairs, national statements of post-war optimism, wrought in taut skins and tensile wire. His stadium roof for the 1972 Munich Olympics was the pinnacle of his experiments with tensile structures, stretched to and fro like a series of dancing spider’s webs, hovering weightlessly above the arena and extruded out to cover the surrounding plaza in a great sweep. But the event was horrifically overshadowed by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes, leading critics to say that continuing with the Games was like “having a dance at Dachau”.
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| Frei Otto’s Olympic Stadium for the 1972 Munich Games. Photo: Ian Walton/Getty Images |
Otto’s pursuit of lightweight, light-touch architecture had been born precisely as a reaction against the strident monumentality of the architecture of the Third Reich. The freeform tent was intended as a loose-fit counterpoint to the rigid order of the marching classical colonnade. His floating canopies were intended to stand as “a real revolution in architecture, remaking Germany as a peaceful country,” he told the BBC in 2014.
He liked to refer to himself more as a natural scientist than an engineer, taking inspiration from an obsessive study of natural forms. He established the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart in 1964, which at times could be mistaken for the storerooms of a natural history museum: his mind was occupied more with the secrets of bird skulls and crustacean shells, plant cells and branching coral, than the stresses of reinforced concrete.
“Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature,” he told Icon magazine in 2005. “Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much.”
Primitive forms were a keen interest too, from Mongolian yurts to tribal tepees, but his ultimate quest was deducing the geometric magic of the humble soap bubble. Given a set of fixed points, he noted, soap film will spread naturally to offer the smallest achievable surface area. It became the premise for many of his projects, from the German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo to the aviary at Munich zoo.
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| Frei Otto’s Aviary in the Munich Zoo at Hellabrunn, 1979-1980. Photo: Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn |
Such work was a huge influence on the “high tech” generation of British architects, seduced by the brave new promise of tensile fabrics. Richard Rogers, one of the Pritzker jurors, cites Otto as a major hero, and his shadow can be seen in everything from Rogers’ proposals to smother the South Bank with a great glass wave, to the stiff white peaks of his Ashford Designer Outlet – and of course the Millennium Dome. There is much of Otto in Michael Hopkins’ Schlumberger Centre and Mound Stand at Lords, while his investigations into pneumatic structures were taken up by Nicholas Grimshaw in the cellular domes of the Eden Project and Leicester’s National Space Centre. His ideas are found in Norman Foster’s work too, from the great grid-shell roof over the Great Court at the British Museum to his gargantuan pleasure-tent in Kazakhstan, worthy of Kubla Khan. In short, he was the godfather of an entire generation – and his legacy lives on in the grubby canopies of service stations and catering marquees all over the world.
But Otto himself was always frustrated that his ideas didn’t go elsewhere. Indeed his dream of developing a new language for a democratic world remained confined to the domain of aviaries and mega-events, co-opted for temporary thrills. In the 1970s he envisioned a fantastical speculative proposal for an Arctic City, to house 40,000 people under a 2km-wide inflatable dome. But it was a naïve utopia, like Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan, that he became highly critical of later in life.
“Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary?” he told Icon. “We can build houses that are two or three kilometres high and we can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city but we have to ask what does it really make? What does society really need?” As Dubai proposes to build the world’s first indoor city as a hermetically sealed retail environment, and Google plans its own greenhouse tech-utopia, a plug-in city garnished with shrubbery, it’s not hard to see why Otto had mixed feelings about his own legacy.
“My generation had a big task after the war and of course we thought we could do it better,” he said. “Today 60 years later, we can’t be proud of what we have done. But we tried; we tried to go a new way.”
Source: Frei Otto: the titan of tent architecture
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