A Conversation with Frei Otto

Candela, and the team made up of Kenzo Tange and me were invited to participate. We were working from Tokyo and ended up winning the bid. That was the only time I competed with Nervi so directly. I hold him in very high regard, but when you are invited to bid on a project like this and you are young, you try to outdo even an authority like him. Without a doubt, Nerviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s buildings are masterworks. Richard Buckminster Fuller: I knew his work and we saw each other for the first time in 1958, in St. Louis, when I was teaching at Washington University (later we met again at Southern Illinois University Carbondale). We had a long conversation, which at times became a heated but friendly discussion on wide-span

Otto (left) with Richard Buckminster Fuller

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A Conversation with Frei Otto

Published on Jun 13, 2011

PA Press

One of the twentieth century's most important design visionaries, German architect and structural engineer Frei Otto (b. 1925) made his mark with a series of super-light tensile structures--such as the West German Pavilion for Montreal's Expo 67 and the Olympic Stadium in Munich (1972)--that are celebrated for their technical ingenuity and material efficiency. Yet despite Otto's achievements, relatively little has been published on his work. A Conversation with Frei Otto features a comprehensive interview with Otto as well as his critical text Fundamentals of a Future Architecture in its entirety. In his conversation with Juan Maria Songel, Otto talks freely about everything from his early connections to the Bauhaus to his thoughts on the current state of engineering and architecture. The latest in our Conversations series, this book also includes images of Otto's most important and well-known works.

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