On the death of the architect Frei Otto – castles in the air for a better world – Süddeutsche.de

Frei Otto, a visionary who was not interested in fame, but for trying out the car. Its roofs are the opposite of lids. That building is a deeply human longing, of which the architect was convinced.

By Gerhard Matzig

If you were to visit with Frei Otto, in his home in Warmbronn in Leonberg, then not only the studio was presented, in which he participated until his death on Monday as the architect and engineer the betterment of the world worked. And along with his wife and daughter. No, if you were really lucky, you got to see the “junk room”. So it called itself Frei Otto Here is or was no junk room, but. Utopia

Utopia is a kind of garage for rent.. Not far from the house. Packed with all sorts of models from yellowish faded Finn cardboard, full of wire or string constructions cocoons. Also stockings are to be seen. For his most important and most famous work, for his crucial Mittun to the symbolic filigree structures and ingenious tent roof structures of the Munich Olympic area for the games of 1972 stockings were existentially important.

These were, as we now know the stockings of Fritz Auer’s wife – and Fritz Auer was a partner of Günter Behnisch. The model, the end of the 1960s that won the day, to the amazement of the professional community in favor of Günter Behnisch and partners in the competition for the modern Olympic Games of the modern era, this model illustrated the new German lightness and weightlessness as a beacon against the stone Matches Berlin, 1936 with stockings! Could not only build. Therefore, Behnisch Frei Otto (and finally Jörg Schlaich) asked for help. Otto helped. And without high performance computers and software architects.

No one could more enthusiasm for the shieldings as Otto

The long considered unbuildable designated tent roof over the Olympic Stadium in Munich

(Photo: dpa )

He calculated the statics together with Schlaich: The Munich tent roof, it was long considered unbuildable, was built. Today, the roof is one of the wonders of the world of the present. A little Utopia, a design for a world as it should be: free, beautiful, light, elegant – and democratic. Some of the models with which Frei Otto worked to make such a Utopia reality, camped in the long hot Bronner junk room. In addition to countless other roof designs. There was never an architect who could inspire the shieldings and over-protection, architectural covering more than Frei Otto. Otto was one that gave people roofs that were the opposite of covers.

Frei Otto was not interested in fame or for the presentation of his work, he was particularly interested in for trial and error for the Try, invent, Car. For the experiment. He was interested in thinking more than doing. Once he said, without regret, he had little built in his life. And what little there is mostly of “castles in the air”.

even more pleased that he, like now was not known, it is just perfect for his life’s work with the most prestigious award in architecture is memorable. The Pritzker receives Frei Otto, the jury, as a “visionary and utopian”. And that is why it is so important in the history of architecture. Of course, there are also a number of buildings and projects from him, away from the Munich tent roof, with whom he has long since been inscribed in the history of the building.

For the Hellabrunn and “Pink Floyd”

call

is about four point sail for a bandstand with the Federal Garden Show in Kassel, in the mid 1950s. Or, in the sixties, the St. Luke’s Church in Bremen (with Carsten Schröck); then of course the German Pavilion at the World Expo in Montreal, 1967: That was as it were the first attempt with larger tent roofs – and decisively, even a model for the Behnisch Design

One would also aviary in Munich Hellabrunn call. Here we see the light as a feather, natural, effortless the formal compositions Otto in pure form. He built but also concrete houses, about 1985, the government and cultural center in Riyadh.

A little known, hardly less interesting is what he has achieved with or for “Pink Floyd”. That was the late 1970s. The band wanted an unusual stage roof for the upcoming US tour. Somehow landed the job with Frei Otto. The thought is extendable, yet is tremendously large umbrellas made. Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, former students of architecture all, loved it. Frei Otto screens were the determining stage architecture. Also, a font, Otto invented a typography that he “Warmbronn” named after his retreat in Swabia.

engineers from around the world flocked to Otto to Stuttgart

There, at the University Stuttgart, founded the man, whose father and grandfather were sculptors in 1964 the first techno think tank in Germany: the “Institute for Lightweight Structures”. It was and is: a worldwide reputation. Engineers from around the world traveled to Germany to attend lectures may Frei Otto.

There was nothing Frei Otto did not find interesting. Nothing that made him not curious. He once told his students that there was his firm belief that a “build-gene”. The person would also build if he had no reason to build something. The building was peculiar to him, the building is something deeply human. A longing

But could -. And this is crucial – only lived in harmony with nature. Frei Otto, the engineer who grappled long before the boom of biomorphism and more formal fashion dynamism about Zaha Hadid with the laws of natural building and, for example, the genius of cobwebs studied or the Munich tent is an example, with wire racks and soap suds experimented. The “organic construction” was largely defined by Frei Otto in succession by Antoni Gaudí to Richard Buckminster Fuller

He had both. The construction of gene and the gene for the responsibility

But the utopian Frei Otto did not think much of utopia without humanity, which appeared last, when he proposed after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center modest, on the grounds of “nothing to build and can only grow grass”. Such thoughtfulness wish you today: a nothing that would preclude the All

The construction gene is thus the one that the gene for the responsibility of man in his time the other.. Frei Otto had both – and the spiritual freedom and greatness to think neither as a paradox, but as a unit. His unusual first name, which often leads to confusion because some think it ought to actually Otto Frei Otto and not free to say is actually a reference to the freedom of thought. Frei Otto was in this sense much more than a pioneer of technology and design, more as an architect and engineer: he was the planner a better world

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