Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by Frei Otto

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German architect Frei Otto.

Last updated on April 21, 2025.

Frei Paul Otto was a German architect and structural engineer noted for his use of lightweight structures, in particular tensile and membrane structures, including the roof of the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics.

German - Architect | May 31, 1925 - March 9, 2015

Source: Wikipedia

Buildings are 'humane' only when they promote peaceful human co-existence.

Frei Otto

We have big, big problems - flooding, earthquake, and many foolish things which now people are doing - I mean, these self-made catastrophes. We are able to give to every man on the street the possibilities to help himself. And to fight for this was one of my duties.

Frei Otto

Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.

Frei Otto

My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.

Frei Otto

Everything man is doing in architecture is to try to go against nature. Of course we have to understand nature to know how far we have to go against nature. The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much. All architects have the tendency to do too much.

Frei Otto

Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?

Frei Otto

My architecture is the architecture of survival.

Frei Otto

My hope is that light, flexible architecture might bring about a new and open society.

Frei Otto