Essay: Mannheim Multihalle
“Dear Professor Otto, We read with interest in the press about your polar city under a plastic dome. Because we are currently concerned with similar questions, we would like to meet with you today and discuss our problem.” These were the opening lines in an official letter to Frei Otto written by Werner Haas, one of the two managing directors of the National Garden Show in Mannheim. The letter dated 21 June 1971 reached Frei Otto at a time when he was under great pressure working on the construction of the transparent roof landscape for the Munich Olympics site designed by architects Behnisch & Partners. To enter into a discussion with Otto, it would therefore have been quite enough to refer to the prestige project currently under construction – or perhaps, in view of the enormous international publicity, look back to the tent roofs of the German pavilion, which Otto completed with Rolf Gutbrod for Expo 67 in Montreal. Werner Haas instead mentioned the City in the Arctic, a German-Japanese research project carried out by the University of Stuttgart Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL). Together with Kenzō Tange and the engineers from Ove Arup, Otto investigated whether it was feasible to put a roof over a city of 40,000 people by erecting a gigantic pneumatic dome stabilised with negative pressure. At first sight, the parallel drawn in the letter – that the National Garden Show Mannheim could possibly be struggling with “similar questions” – might appear weird and completely megalomaniac.
