The hidden world of valiant ideas

"Less is more" – architectural aesthetics

In 1948 Frei Otto began studying architecture at the Technical University of Berlin during the Berlin blockade. While doing so, he attended courses on modern history of art and modern construction design, as well as lectures on biology, music and history within the General Studies programme.

In 1950, as a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation, he was one of the first German students in the postwar period to travel through the USA, where he met the architects Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen and Richard Neutra. At the time the big architecture firms were experimenting with surfaces and structural designs based on strictly economic principles. They focussed on the following basic types of buildings: city-centre tower blocks, expansive greenfield corporate complexes with offices and living quarters, and structures with expressive symbolic features.

Inspired by the concepts of elaborate and organic structures, Frei Otto returned to a Europe that had been ravaged by war, and in 1953 completed his PhD thesis, entitled "Suspended Roofs", which proposed a "natural" solution to economic and technical problems within architecture. He used cable net and membrane structures to create a delicate mixture of interior space and nature.

From then on the young freelance architect designed the Atelier font, structures and buildings for various pavilions in Germany and the Development Workshop for Lightweight Structures in Berlin in 1957.

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