FreiOtto - inspired inventor, researcher and designer (part 2)

摘要

Computer visualisation and interactive systems, coupled with advanced simulation, have made the engineer's job easier - just so that Frei Otto and fellow architects and designers can raise the bar again to explore built form and to employ a most unusual range of materials - cables and membranes and foils, timber and painted glass and stainless steel, stone, self-compacting concrete and paper tubes, and much else. It is a way of thinking - more from less and yet not forgetting the importance of the human spirit. Otto's many projects were often difficult to engineer but they are now a delight to inhabit. The influence of Otto's philosophy and innovation has spread out around the world and continues strongly into the 21st century. It is amplified this year by the award to Michael Schlaich of the Institution's 2015 Gold Medal for many fine cable, membrane, glass and other structures across the world. To this day, the IL, led by Werner Sobek, is the centre of the lightweight structures diaspora that has spread its influence across the world from Germany to France, Italy, the UK, the USA, Japan and Mexico - and now to India and China. In the USA, following on from the works of David Geiger and Horst Berger, many of the themes so dear to Otto's practice are being developed and carried forward in the designs and projects of Nicholas Goldsmith, Senior Principal of FTL Design and Engineering Studio, New York. His numerous, elegant, lightweight and portable designs for 21st-century places of performance, retail and meeting resoundingly reflect his apprenticeship at the Atelier Warmbronn in the late 1970s~2. In the UK, Otto's influence has exerted itself primarily through the work of architects Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins, Richard Rogers, Mike Davis, Edward Cullinan and Richard Burton and through the engineering consultants Ove Arup, Anthony Hunt (1994 Institution Gold Medallist), Atelier One, Expedition Engineering and, over many years, BuroHappold Engineering. Perhaps the secret of success of Otto and his teams' many projects is that they capture the spirit of the architecture of their locality, but do so in an unashamedly modern and technologically progressive way, compelling the use of the latest engineering knowledge and techniques. Working with Otto as an engineer was certainly not for the fainthearted. Partly, this was because a combination of his research and reality modelling led him to a conviction of what the outcome could be - it merely needed analysing and the outcome communicating to the constructor - safely. There may also be a more prosaic answer to the technological progress made through these projects - Otto's intense interest in the actual behaviour of material stimulated real research and development from the material scientists and engineers. I well remember the research stimulated by Otto that drove development on membranes at Stuttgart, Bath and other universities and encouraged the Sarna company and others to develop the PVC-coated polyester outer membrane for the sports hall at Jeddah, which 30 years on is still doing good service in its aggressive climate. Frei Otto and Ted Happold remained great friends and professional collaborators until the latter's death in 1996 - and beyond through those of us at BuroHappold and Bath University - all subscribing to the rigour of looking at the whole picture and believing that research drives invention, which in turn inspires the creation of innovative answers for our natural and built environment. Otto, who was recently awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, leaves his wife, Ingrid, three sons and two daughters - of whom one, Christine Kanstinger Otto, a qualified architect, works in the Atelier Warmbronn. His was an extraordinary life of invention and imagination, and his influence on design for the built environment will survive long after him in many parts of the world.