FREI OTTO’S EARLY YEARS were marked by instability and scarcity. He was born into an impoverished post–World War I Germany, educated in Berlin in the tumultuous years leading up to World War II, and drafted into the German military in 1943 before he could finish his degree in architecture. His first professional experience, of a kind, came when he spent two years as a prisoner of war in Chartres and became the camp architect. This beginning of personal and professional austerity left him obsessed with doing as much as possible with as little as possible.
Otto’s fascination with the ultralight and the ultraminimal went far beyond aesthetics, in other words. Indeed, his passion took him well past the bounds of architectural convention and representation: His buildings were so perfectly optimized that they could not be drawn by hand or even calculated with the computers available at the height of his career.
Instead, Otto worked more like a scientist than a designer, devising physical experiments to determine the shapes and configurations of his buildings. Otto built countless models, and while at first glance these appear similar to conventional architectural models, they are in fact precise scientific instruments that determined the configuration of forces acting on and shaping his structures.
Some of the most striking “models” he created were intricate machines that dipped wire frames into a soap solution. When the frames were lifted out of the liquid, bubbles would form between the wires, with the surface tension of the bubble automatically creating the smallest possible surface area between the wires—in geometric terms, the minimal surface of a bounding curve, a shape that was almost impossible to calculate or determine in any way other than this empirical experimentation. Otto documented the results and then scaled them up to produce a building that not only used the least possible material but that also distributed stress forces evenly throughout —an essential property for structural stability in lightweight construction.
In such cases, Otto necessarily had to find the form of his buildings rather than design it. Instead of willfully shaping material, he invented experimental methods that would let him discover the shapes he wanted. Much has been made of Otto’s early interest in what is now called sustainable design, and in his lightweight structures as a symbolic postwar counterpoint to the massive monuments of National Socialism. But the true marker of Otto’s genius was the precise and inventive process through which he designed his buildings.
Sadly, Otto has died just when his ideas are regaining popularity. In his later career, he worked as a consultant and collaborator with many other well-known designers, for example with Shigeru Ban for the Japanese pavilion at the Expo 2000 and with Ingenhoven, Overdiek und Partner on the Stuttgart 21 project. This is unusual for a late-career architect of his stature and underscores the fact that his life was based on the generous production of knowledge rather than the cultivation of an idiosyncratic artistic sensibility.
Otto wrote: “To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.” For him, architectural production was synonymous with the production of new ideas. A scientific approach to creating knowledge is all the more innovative in a field most often associated with cultural production. Otto’s legacy will be his drive toward rationality in all things, even in the murky and subjective realm of design.
Leo Henke is an architect based in New York
