October 7, 2004

Frei Otto, 79, the German architect and engineer, has won the latest Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal, it was announced today. Otto’s pioneering tensile structures and grid shells have been widely influential. A German citizen and the son and grandson of sculptors, he is responsible for the revival of the tent as a feature of modern architecture. As architect of the prisoner of war camp he was also held in as a pilot with the German Air Force during the Second World War, he found solutions using the least possible materials. It was from this point that his interest in aerodynamics and functional structures applying the principles of stretching membranes over light frameworks became key elements in his work.

His interest in applications of modern technology and research into natural forms have led him to be regarded as a world-ranking innovator in architecture and engineering. His most famous projects include the West German Pavilion at the Montreal Exposition in 1967 and the roofs over several of the sports structures at the 1972 Olympic Park in Munich. Otto has been a visiting Professor at Washington, Yale, Berkeley and Harvard universities, as well as at MIT, and published numerous works on tensile and pneumatic structures. He will be presented with the Royal Gold Medal at the RIBA, London, on February 16, 2005.

Lucy Bullivant

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