Another great one gone

Fred Bernstein has an obituary in The New York Times for Frei Otto, a great architect:

Frei Otto, an architect and engineer known for creating dazzling tensile structures that inspired generations of architects to dangle roofs from poles and cables, died recently in Germany, weeks before he was to be named the recipient of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious honor. He was 89.
Peter Palumbo, the Pritzker chairman, announced the death. Otto had been told about the prize in January, Palumbo said. An award ceremony is scheduled for 15 May in Miami, Florida.
Otto’s work grew out of a time of scarcity after World War Two, when a shortage of construction materials encouraged him to innovate. One inspiration, he said, was the soap bubble, which showed him how to create the maximum enclosure with the minimum material.
Otto “turned a creative obsession with the techniques of lightweight, minimal construction into high art,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1971.
He celebrated the bubble in his design of the West German Pavilion at the World Expo in Montreal, Canada in 1967  (photo, bottom). The pavilion’s “membrane-topped network of cables,” Huxtable wrote, formed “an intricate wonderland of soaring shapes and magic, filtered light” that resulted in “an experience impossible to forget.”
Five years after the Montreal project, at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Otto made an even bigger impression with his stadium covering and other prominent buildings designed in collaboration with Behnisch & Partner. Their acrylic roofs, draped from steel cables, resembled spider webs.
The architecture scholar Michael Meredith said in 2010 that, with these and other projects, Otto “seemed to be rethinking structure at its fundamental principles.” Otto’s work, he said, was “incredibly influential to a younger generation of architects who were interested in exploring structures based on natural principles, rather than based on idealized geometric forms.”
Like R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary American architect to whom he was sometimes compared, Otto was drawn to designing World’s Fair pavilions because of the expectation that the buildings would be temporary, which gave him the freedom to experiment with unconventional materials and methods.
In an otherwise favorable review of Otto’s work on display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, Huxtable disputed the assertion that Otto’s ideas would revolutionize workplace and home design. “To suggest that these structures are the answer to the age-old question of all construction— how to achieve more with less material and effort— is woefully misleading,” she wrote. The problem, she added, was that “the ‘simplicity’ of these lovely forms is complex beyond belief,” requiring “unbelievably elaborate models and testing procedures.” As a result, she wrote, the forms were more appropriate to one-time events than to everyday uses.
Frei Paul Otto was born on 31 May 1925, in Siegmar, outside Chemnitz, Germany, the son of a sculptor. As a child, he built model airplanes; at fifteen, he began piloting gliders. Drafted at seventeen, he served in the Luftwaffe during World War Two.
Captured, he was sent to a French POW camp, where, he said, he was struck by the need for temporary, inexpensive shelter. In 1951, during a study tour in the United States, he traveled to the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, North Carolina where he was awed by the soaring cable-supported roof of the J.S. Dorton Arena, a multi-use building completed in 1952.
Otto opened his practice in 1952, the same year he married Ingrid Smolla, with whom he had five children: Angela Boley, Bettina Otto-Matthes, Christine Otto-Kanstinger, Dietmar Otto, and Erdmute Böcker. His wife survives him, but complete information about other survivors was not available. Palumbo did not provide a cause of death for Otto, or details on where he died. He lived in Leonberg, Germany, near Stuttgart.
In 1964, Otto founded the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the College of Technology in Stuttgart. More than thirty years after Otto designed the Montreal pavilion in collaboration with Rolf Gutbrod, he worked with the architect Shigeru Ban to create the Japanese Pavilion, with a roof made of paper, for Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany.
Though Otto designed few major buildings after 2000, a younger generation of architects explored forms based on his work, aided by computer programs unavailable to Otto early in his career.
In 2005, when Otto won Britain’s Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the influential London publication Building Design wrote that roofs derived from his work “now regularly erupt in garden pavilions, exhibition halls, shopping centers, and rarely with any loss of visual excitement.”

Rico says he first became fascinated with Otto's work back in college, when the Munich Olympics revealed his work, and still thinks the guy was a fucking genius...