Architect Frei Otto Wins Pritzker Prize
March 13, 2015
The roof structure designed by Frei Otto in Olympiapark, Munich, for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games. Structures such as these roofs are engineered using tension, much like tents use. Credit: Dmitry V. Petrenko, Shutterstock
German architect Frei Otto won the 2015 Pritzker Architecture Prize, becoming the first architect to win the prize after his death. Otto died on March 9, 2015, at the age of 89. The prize was scheduled to be officially announced on March 23. However, Otto was informally notified of the honor earlier in 2015. The prize ceremony will be held as previously scheduled on May 15 in Miami. But in place of Otto accepting the award in person, past Pritzker winners will speak about Otto’s life and work.
In its award citation, the Pritzker jury said Otto “has embraced a definition of an architect to include researcher, inventor, form-finder, engineer, builder, teacher, collaborator, environmentalist, humanist, and creator of remarkable buildings and spaces.” The British architect Sir Richard Rogers, a past Pritzker Prize-winner, praised Otto as “one of the great architects and engineers of the 20th century. His work has inspired and influenced modern architecture, as we all learn to do more with less, and to trade monumental structures for economy, light and air.”
Otto was born on May 31, 1925, in Siegmar, outside Chemnitz in eastern Germany. He grew up in Berlin, serving as a pilot in the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) during World War II (1939-1945). He was captured near Nuremberg and spent two years as a prisoner of war in France, where he worked as a camp architect. After the war ended in 1945, Otto studied architecture at the Technical Institute of Berlin, earning a doctorate in civil engineering in 1954.
In 1952, Otto became a free-lance architect designing buildings that were lightweight, low-cost, and sometimes temporary. He first attracted attention for tent structures used as temporary pavilions at the Federal Garden Show in Germany as well as other events during the 1950’s. From that point, his signature buildings were lightweight structures created out of such materials as fabric, wire, and paper.
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