Frei Otto: I’m one hundred per cent an architect, but I also have great understanding for the work of engineers. My main role once was to act as a kind of interpreter.
Detail: You have described that as a process of bringing together teams for demanding projects. What is required for a team to function well?
Frei Otto: One has to know what people are capable of doing. The more demanding a project is, the more one needs people who can do the things involved. Often there are only a few people who are capable of that, and they have to be designated.
Detail: Is there a lack of understanding between the various disciplines today?
Frei Otto: Architects have grown into the habit of putting things down on paper for which they know there are engineers who will be able to implement them. Especially when concrete is used, there are many engineers today who merely determine the dimensions. In the case of larger, more difficult projects, that is certainly not adequate, however.
Detail: To what degree should the engineer influence the design? Should he be an equal partner at the design stage?
Frei Otto: Yes, if he has the ability, but there are really very few engineers of that kind. In part, it has to do with one’s nature or disposition. People who enter the engineering profession today mostly have mathematical gifts and understand something about physics, although that may be more tenuous. People who end up becoming architects, on the other hand, are those who can draw well – usually on the computer nowadays – and who wish to design freely, unrestrained by engineers. In other words, two quite different ways of thinking are involved here.
Detail: Is more research needed in architecture for it to go on developing?
Frei Otto: When research is undertaken, it is usually in an applied realm – for some detail or other. As far as basic research is concerned, things look rather grim. I don’t understand colleagues who think that architecture has nothing to do with science. In the faculties of architecture, no research is done at all, and there’s no motivation – like a doctorate – to do any. That’s not the fault of the students, but of the teachers.
Detail: Are things any better in constructional engineering?
Frei Otto: Oh, yes. There, a doctor’s degree means a better qualification. In architecture, you don’t even need a diploma in some
places. There are some good architects and professors without a doctorate or even a diploma. Having said that, though, I think architecture is a subject just as suited to doing doctoral studies and research work as any other at university. Some university colleagues, however, believe an architect is not a scientist, and that’s an error. How good it would be if architects who had created an important building could gain a doctorate with it and pass on all the experience they had acquired in the process. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen.
Detail: For some of the buildings that are acclaimed today one can find direct models in your publications. Does it annoy you when you see others implementing the things you have thought out earlier?
Frei Otto: That’s a central aspect of research: to see one’s findings implemented. In most cases, innumerable alternatives can be developed on this basis. What is strange is when certain findings are repeatedly implemented.
It means that the outer form is more important than the understanding on which it is based. The airport terminal roof in Stuttgart is an example of this. We had planned this very carefully for the Kocommas government centre in Riad. We revised the plans again before the actual construction phase; but on the death of the king, the scheme was stopped. In Stuttgart, it was not the final construction form that was copied, but an earlier design stage. The aim of research, however, should be variability, not just imitation.
Detail: You have provided some of the most important impulses in the field of membrane construction. Does state-of-the-art design always imply lightweight forms of construction?
Frei Otto: As a sculptor, I come from the stonemason’s corner, and I have built in a heavy, massive form, too. As a student, I was fascinated when I visited Frank Lloyd Wright in Taliesin West, where he combined stone, concrete and brickwork with sail-like elements in a most wonderful manner. The interplay between mass and lightness was fantastic. As far as the overall economic balance of a structure is concerned, though, a building should not consume energy unnecessarily, and lightweight construction tends to fit that bill.
Detail: Specialist areas like building physics and energy planning are becoming increasingly important. Is that possible only through a division of labour, or should architects and engineers have enough ability and confidence to cope with these things themselves?
Frei Otto: You can’t expect everyone to do everything. Not everyone is a Leonardo. But one should have a grasp of the basics and be able to make a judgement. A sensible approach to energy, for example, cannot be achieved just by adhering to codes of practice. Even if one scrupulously observes modern energy-saving regulations, for example, it is still possible to make fundamental constructional errors that may result in condensation and damage to a building. And any lawyer will tell you that if you know a law or regulation to be incorrect, but you nevertheless apply it, you will be in the wrong. In other words, the more one knows, the more responsibility one bears. As a result, a lot of architects today say they’d rather not know, and they push all these things off on to specialists.
Detail: What relationship do you have to bi-onics – a discipline in which industry has
taken a great interest over the years?
Frei Otto: There’s no denying that you can and should learn from living nature; but if you pursue this idea seriously, you come to recognize that technology and the things man creates are not living things. People often use the term “bionics” to sell their ideas, because they are afraid to say: “I invented this.” If you say, “I copied this from nature”, everyone has a feeling that since the Creation is divine and has been perfected over millions of years, it cannot possibly be bad. But this overlooks the fact that living nature has optimized itself only in a tiny area, and even there it is never perfect. It is still in a state of turbulent development today. In some fields, it is really not worthwhile copying nature. There are fibres and wires used in the technical realm that have ten times the strength of any natural fibre; and the wheel doesn’t exist in nature either. The whole natural world is built from a single constructional detail: a casing filled with fluid. When Montgolfier invented the balloon, he created the most effective lightweight construction known to date. Only after one knows these combinations of a membrane skin with air or water does one recognize that living nature is similar. In other words, the route is the other way round, and in my research work I have mostly gone in this reverse direction.
Detail: You have always resisted any comparison between your cable-net structures and cobwebs.
Frei Otto: Well, yes, especially when people say I studied cobwebs and was thus able to come up with broad-span cable-net structures. Here, too, it was the other way round. The spider researchers came to me after the Olympic Games in Munich and wanted me to explain the principle of cobwebs.
Detail: The roof over the Olympic Stadium in Munich still appears futuristic today. Haven’t we gone beyond this in the meantime?
Frei Otto: I never wanted to do anything futuristic. I’m simply interested in doing something new, and when one succeeds in that, it points in the direction of the future anyway. You don’t need to do anything special for that.
