Review: Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling

Abstract

Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany 5 November 2016–12 March 2017 The German architect and visionary Frei Otto was, throughout his life, true to his unconventional first name: he was a free spirit, inventor, and experimenter. From his time as a student onward, he pushed at the limits of the technologically possible and created spaces that were previously unimaginable. In his dissertation, completed in 1954 and titled “Das hangende Dach” (The suspended roof), he explored the new roof structures that he had encountered when he traveled to the United States in 1950 on a grant from the Technical University of Berlin. Thus he had studied the predecessors of Hugh Stubbins's Kongresshalle before it was erected in Berlin, where he studied and worked. He used the opportunity of being in the United States to visit famous architects, among them the leaders of interwar German innovation, Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Richard Neutra. In 1958, Otto founded the private Institut fur Leichte Flachentragwerke (Institute for Lightweight Structures) in Berlin, where he explored the possibilities of innovative roof construction. In 1964 he moved to Stuttgart, and the institute became affiliated with the university there. From this basis, he worked in close collaboration with other architects and engineers on groundbreaking projects such as the German Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal; the complex for the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, which he designed with Gunter Behnisch; and finally, in partnership with Ingenhoven Overdiek, the successful 1997 competition entry for the new Stuttgart Central Station, better known as Stuttgart 21. In 2015 Otto was …