Frei Otto was born in Siegmar, Germany, on May 31, 1925, and grew up in Berlin. “Frei” in German means “free”; his mother thought of the name after attending a lecture on freedom. Otto’s father and grandfather were both sculptors, and as a young student, he worked as an apprentice in stonemasonry during school holidays. For a hobby he flew and designed glider planes — this activity piqued his interest in how thin membranes stretched over light frames could respond to aerodynamic and structural forces.

When he had his university-entrance diploma in 1943, Otto signed up at once to study architecture, but he was not allowed to. Instead, he was drafted into the labor force. In September 1943, Otto was called for military service and he trained as a pilot. The pilot training was stopped at the end of 1944 and Otto became a foot soldier. In April 1945, he was captured near Nürnberg and became a prisoner of war. He stayed for two years in a prisoner of war camp near Chartres in France. There he worked as a camp architect; and he learned to build many types of structures with as little material as possible.

After the war, in 1948, Frei Otto returned to study architecture at the Technical University of Berlin. His architecture would always be a reaction to the heavy, columned buildings constructed for a supposed eternity under the Third Reich in Germany. Otto’s work, in contrast, was lightweight, open to nature, democratic, low-cost, and sometimes even temporary.

In 1950, with scholarship funds, he embarked on a study trip through the United States, where he visited the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, among others. During this time he also studied sociology and urban development at the University of Virginia.In 1952, Frei Otto became a freelance architect and founded his own architectural office in Berlin. He earned a doctorate of civil engineering at the Technical University of Berlin in 1954. His dissertation Das Hangende Dach, Gestalt und Struktur (“The Suspended Roof, Form and Structure”) was published in German, Polish, Spanish and Russian. Also in 1954 he began work with “the tentmaker” Peter Stromeyer at L. Stromeyer & Co. In 1955, he designed and built (with Peter Stromeyer) three lightweight minimal temporary structures made of cotton fabric for the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Garden Exhibition) in Kassel, Germany. These were his first works to gain national recognition, in part for how they harmonized with nature.

Frei Otto pioneered the use of modern, lightweight, tent-like structures for many uses. He was attracted to them partly for their economical and ecological values. As early as the 1950s, he built complex models to test and perfect tensile shapes. Throughout his career, Otto always built physical models to determine the optimum shape of a form and to test its behavior. Engineers in his studio were early adopters of computers for structural analysis of Frei Otto’s projects, but the basic input data for these calculations came from the physical form-finding models.

In 1958, Otto founded the first of several institutions he would establish that were dedicated to lightweight structures — the Institute for Development of Lightweight Construction, a small private institute — and opened a new studio in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin. Over the next five years he taught periodically in the United States, taking on visiting professorships at Washington University, St. Louis; Yale University; University of California at Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Harvard University.

The establishment of the Biology and Building research group at the Technical University of Berlin in 1961 marked the beginning of his cooperative work between architects, engineers, and biologists. They applied their knowledge of tents, grid shells, and other lightweight structures to better understand the designs of biological structures and forms.

In 1962, Otto published the first volume of his major opus Tensile Structures: Design, Structure and Calculation of Buildings of Cables, Nets and Membranes (the second volume was published in 1966). In 1964, he became director of the newly founded Institute for Lightweight Structures (Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke or IL) at the University of Stuttgart. IL was commissioned by the German government to conduct research in connection with the planning of the German pavilion for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Canada, better known as Expo 67. The leaders of Germany chose Otto’s architecture to demonstrate the nation’s post-World War II industrial and engineering expertise and innovative technologies. The resulting German pavilion at Expo 67, created in collaboration with Rolf Gutbrod and Fritz Leonhardt, gave Frei Otto his international breakthrough as an architect and a design engineer. It's an early example of a large scale, passive solar building.

Frei Otto, born almost 90 years ago in Germany, has spent his long career researching, experimenting, and developing a most sensitive architecture that has influenced countless others throughout the world. The lessons of his pioneering work in the field of lightweight structures that are adaptable, changeable and carefully use limited resources are as relevant today as when they were first proposed over 60 years ago. He has embraced a definition of architect to include researcher, inventor, form-finder, engineer, builder, teacher, collaborator, environmentalist, humanist, and creator of memorable buildings and spaces.

He first became known for his tent structures used as temporary exhibition pavilions. The constructions at the German Federal Garden exhibitions and other festivals of the 1950s were functional, beautiful, “floating” roofs that seemed to effortlessly provide shelter, and then were easily dissembled after the events.  

The cable net structure employed for the German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, prefabricated in Germany and assembled on site in a short period of time, was a highlight of the exhibition for its grace and originality. The impressive large-scale roofs designed for the Munich Olympics of 1972, combining lightness and strength, were a building challenge that many said could not be achieved. The architectural landscape for stadium, pool and public spaces, a result of the efforts of a large team, is still impressive today.

Taking inspiration from nature and the processes found there, he sought ways to use the least amount of materials and energy to enclose spaces. He practiced and advanced ideas of sustainability, even before the word was coined. He was inspired by natural phenomena – from birds’ skulls to soap bubbles and spiders’ webs. He spoke of the need to understand the “physical, biological and technical processes which give rise to objects.” Branching concepts from the 1960s optimized structures to support large flat roofs. A grid shell, such as seen in the Mannheim Multihalle of 1974, shows how a simple structural solution, easy to assemble, can create a most striking, flexible space. The Mechtenberg footbridges, with the use of humble slender rods and connecting nodes, but with advanced knowledge, produce an attractive filigree pattern and spandistances up to 30 meters. Otto’s constructions are in harmony with nature and always seek to do more with less.

The New World Center, Miami Beach, Florida, USA



The New World Center (opened 2011) is an innovative concert hall and music education campus in Miami Beach, designed by Pritzker Prize Laureate Frank Gehry. Conceived to be at the intersection of architecture and music, the project emerged from a close collaboration between Frank Gehry and his long-time friend, the New World Symphony's artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas. The 756 steeply-banked seats of the New World Center put concertgoers close to the music, and architectural panels or "sails," hanging below the ceiling allow creative video projections in the hall, integrated with the music and the architecture. The center also fronts a public park in which people picnic and enjoy the concerts as an exterior wall of the building becomes an enormous "wall-cast video screen." The New World Symphony aims to make classical music accessible and enticing to younger generations.

Past Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremonies have been held at the Grand Trianon and Chateau of Versailles; Tōdai- ji , Buddhist Temple in Japan; Prague Castle in the Czech Republic; the White House in Washington, D.C.; and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Some of the most beautiful museums around the world have also hosted the event, among them, the Altes Museum, Berlin; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Read Frei Otto's Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Read Tom Pritzker's Ceremony Speech

Read Lord Peter Palumbo's Ceremony Speech

Ceremony Highlights

Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates

Shigeru Ban, 2014 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Louis Kahn asked the brick, “What do you want to become, brick?”

The brick answered, “I want to become an arch.”

I think that Frei Otto was an architect who kept asking the “air” what it wanted to become.

He kept thinking about how to envelop “air” or “space” with the minimum of material and power.

He was still touching materials and drawing sketches until his last breath. His achievements, rather than just being his “works,” have become the ‘‘grammar’’ of structural design, unnoticed, and we architects are only now realizing that we unconsciously base our designs on his grammar.

I am truly indebted to Frei Otto, for sharing his deep understanding and inventions in the field of architecture.

Zaha Hadid, 2004 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 
The fluidity of Frei Otto’s work is as uplifting as it was profoundly inventive — a persuasive manifesto of nature’s logic and unity, demonstrating how architectural design and engineering can emulate nature’s morphogenesis. The more our own design research evolves, the more we learn to appreciate his pioneering works. He will continue to influence architects and engineers for generations to come.

We first met in Germany early in my career and he became a dear friend. His research and exploration of tensile structures was inspirational and enlightening, and his Pritzker Prize is very well deserved. Our joy of this news is some consolation for the loss of a great friend, architect, inventor, educator and gentleman. Our thoughts are with his family at this time. 

Frank Gehry, 1989 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Frei Otto forever changed the way we think about structure and building. Through his experiments in form-finding, Otto simultaneously affirmed and questioned the conventions of engineering as we knew it, and in the process showed us unprecedented solutions to age old problems — where others saw mass as the solution, he offered lightness. Like the ancients and others that came before him, he questioned the origins of our assumptions by going back to nature and figuring it out for himself. There he found systems, networks, and surfaces that exceeded all our imaginations. He found logic in complexity, and proceeded to translate the lessons he learned into efficiently realized constructions.

Otto was far ahead of his time in anticipating the issues that would confront the built landscape today: population density, transience, impermanence, energy demands, the growing scale of structures, etc. It is everyone's loss that we will not have his visionary contributions to the conversations of the day.

Thom Mayne, 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
I was both very happy to hear yesterday of Frei Otto’s Pritzker Prize recognition and profoundly saddened to learn of his passing.

For my generation of architects, Frei Otto was an altruistic revolutionary who produced works of immense intellect and beauty. His pioneering message of technology for the sake of society has become increasingly relevant as we move into this digital age.

His explorations into light, strong tensile systems were not merely technological pursuits; they were didactic of a larger social discourse of inclusion and egalitarianism.

Ultimately, under his visionary innovations, he initiated a new age of possibilities for architecture to offer intelligence, performance, hope, and optimism.

Renzo Piano, 1998 Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Frei Otto has been one of the most seminal people on my route to architecture.

By the clear determination to work on basic shelters for human communities.

And exploring the movement of forces within the structure to make it visible.

Celebrating lightness.

And fighting against gravity.

He succeeded in this and he will always be in my thoughts.

Wang Shu, 2012 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
As a pioneer of lightweight structures, Frei Otto was the architect that our generation researched when we were in college.

In fact, there are three kinds of architects today. The first kind are those who have been exploring in the areas of art and culture and trying to express this in architectural languages. The second and most common kind are those who have been focusing on urban problems and environment; architects in the past were rarely involved in urban planning, but now the number is steadily increasing. The third kind are like Frei Otto — they have been exploring and developing new technology. There are fewer and fewer architects of the third kind now.

Lightweight structure doesn’t need a thick foundation; it uses less material and has an obvious advantage in environmental protection. Therefore, in modern times, many architects are interested in the research, including me.

In the modern architecture context in which commercial buildings get an increasingly dominant position, awarding the Pritzker Prize to Frei Otto may imply that architecture should return to its origin.

Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, 2001 Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
We thought Frei Otto had been given the Pritzker Prize long ago! His work was very new and different in his time, a kind of optimistic modernism which is so dearly missing in today's eclectic earnestness! Frei Otto's work looks still fresh and inspiring!

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, 2010 Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
We are deeply saddened by the news of Frei Otto’s passing.

He was an outstanding architect and a great visionary whose influence will last for many generations to come.

We are grateful for his generosity in educating, inspiring, and encouraging the rest of us.

Norman Foster, 1999 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
I was deeply saddened to hear that Frei Otto had passed away on Monday. On the occasion of his 80th birthday ten years ago I wrote the following tribute:

Frei Otto showed us that architecture need not be burdened by the weight of its own traditions, but could instead be free to express itself through simple but innovative sculptural forms — his was an architecture inspired by lightness. This sense of weightlessness, and of an architecture unbound by convention, was carried over into Frei’s working relationships. Rather than working in isolation, he consistently advocated a freer role for the architect — whether this was as an educator, sharing his ideas with generations of students, or in practice, through valued joint projects with, or providing research support for, other architects and engineers. For me, he reinforced the point that architecture is a fundamentally collaborative exercise. His extraordinary structures altered the nature of architectural form in the twentieth century, and his environmentalism, intelligence and foresight have established the defining architectural mentality for the twenty-first. He was an inspiration.


Richard Meier, 1984 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Frei Otto was an architect of enormous talent and his creativity was all encompassing. In addition to his inventive work as an individual practitioner, he was an important associate to many in the field of architecture and engineering. His tremendous contributions will be appreciated and valued for a long, long time.