German Architect Frei Otto Wins 2015 Pritzker Prize a Day After His Death
Source: http://www.dezeen.com
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A day after his death, German architect Frei Otto was named the 2015 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's highest honor.
The award typically goes to a living architect. Otto died on 9 March at age 89, so the announcement of the prize, scheduled for March 23, was hastily moved up. The executive director of the prize, Martha Thorne, a former architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Otto of the award before he died.
Mr. Otto's work grew out of a time of scarcity after World War II, 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. Without Frei Otto, many of the structures and buildings of the past 50 years wouldn't exist. Because Otto wasn't just an architect-he was also a brilliant inventor and engineer who pioneered some of the most far-fetched feats of structural engineering ever completed.
"Throughout his life," said the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury, "Frei Otto has produced imaginative, fresh, unprecedented spaces and constructions."
Otto's major buildings include the German pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, roof for Olympic Stadium, Munich in 1972, Tuwaiq Palace, Saudi Arabia, with Buro Happold in 1985 and the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.
The award comes with US$ 100,000 and a bronze medallion. It will be presented, presumably to representatives of the architect, on May 15 in Miami Beach.
Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes; it is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. The Pritzker Prize won such architectures, as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Oscar Niemeyer, Wang Shu, Toyo Ito . Otto is the second German architect to win the award. The first was Gottfried Boehm, the 1986 winner.
The award typically goes to a living architect. Otto died on 9 March at age 89, so the announcement of the prize, scheduled for March 23, was hastily moved up. The executive director of the prize, Martha Thorne, a former architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, told Otto of the award before he died.
Mr. Otto's work grew out of a time of scarcity after World War II, 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. Without Frei Otto, many of the structures and buildings of the past 50 years wouldn't exist. Because Otto wasn't just an architect-he was also a brilliant inventor and engineer who pioneered some of the most far-fetched feats of structural engineering ever completed.
"Throughout his life," said the citation from the nine-member Pritzker jury, "Frei Otto has produced imaginative, fresh, unprecedented spaces and constructions."
Otto's major buildings include the German pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, roof for Olympic Stadium, Munich in 1972, Tuwaiq Palace, Saudi Arabia, with Buro Happold in 1985 and the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.
The award comes with US$ 100,000 and a bronze medallion. It will be presented, presumably to representatives of the architect, on May 15 in Miami Beach.
Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes; it is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. The Pritzker Prize won such architectures, as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Oscar Niemeyer, Wang Shu, Toyo Ito . Otto is the second German architect to win the award. The first was Gottfried Boehm, the 1986 winner.
