Architecture before architecture: Frei Otto's ‘Deep History’

Abstract

The German architect Frei Otto was deeply concerned with the environmental crisis caused by the presence of humans on earth. Otto responded to this by investigating the origins, and potential futures, of architecture through the lens of natural history. This paper will focus on the significant collaboration between Frei Otto and the German biologist and anthropologist Johann-Gerhard Helmcke (1908–1993). Their collaboration began in the early 1960s, and can be largely credited for Otto's interest in biology and his appropriation of scientific methodology. Helmcke's anthropological work also influenced Otto's understanding of the role of humans in creating architecture and the environment. Otto and Helmcke developed a theory of bio-technics based on measuring and calculating the structural properties of plants, animals and even human bodies. Eventually, they invented a cosmology of objects that extended to all forms, whether living or non-living, natural or technological—including architecture.Helmcke argued that ‘if we want to comprehend the concept “nature” in as pure a way as possible, we must refer back to that prehistoric period when there were as yet no people to intervene in the natural equilibrium’. By directly testing materials that included hair, bones, spider webs and seashells, Otto looked for structures that corresponded to what can be described as ‘an architecture before humans’. At an historical moment in which modernist narratives of progress and the domination of nature came increasingly under question, Otto sought alternative means to construct the development and history of form. What are the problems raised in this renewed search for the origins of architecture? Did Otto's quest for structural optimisation in nature simply introduce another anthropocentric narrative? This paper will examine these and other contradictions in Frei Otto's relationship to the architecture of the pre- and un-human.