Frei Otto

Building With Nature

Author Joaquín Medina Warmburg Anna-Maria Meister
Publisher Prestel
Place of publication Munich
Year 2025
Number of pages 256

Art and Culture Books

The Natural Construction

Frei Otto, Revisited on His Centenary

Joaquín Medina Warmburg

01/04/2025

Pavilion of the Federal Republic of Germany at the Universal Exposition, Montreal, 1967

On several occasions, the architect and researcher Frei Otto urged his colleagues in the profession to once and for all stop building in a way that was contrary to nature. Paradoxically, he also declared that he did not conceive of anything existing beyond the natural, of anything not being nature in one of its many forms. Even the most artificial thing was ultimately a part of the natural realm, “as shadow is a form of light.” That is how he put it in writing in the mid-1980s, when he was already unanimously recognized as one of the pioneers of a new ecological architecture...