Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal.
Publisher: Edition Axel Menges Gmbh
Published: 1995
Place of publication: S.l
Language: eng
Description: Primeval architecture is an architecture of necessity. Nothing is there to excess, no matter whether stone, clay, reeds or wood, animal skins or hair are used. It is minimal. It can be very beautiful even amidst poverty & is good in the ethical sense. Good architecture seems to be more important than beautiful architecture. Beautiful architecture is not necessarily good. Only buildings that are at the same time ethically good & aesthetically beautiful are worth preserving. We have too many buildings that have become useless & yet we still need new buildings, from pole to pole, in the cold & in the heat. Man\'s present areas of settlement are the new ecological system in which technology is indispensable, even in hot & cold areas. ... Our age requires buildings that are lighter, more energy-saving, more mobile & more adaptable, in brief more natural, without disregarding the need for safety & security. This logically leads to the further development of light constructions, to the building of tents, shells, awnings & air-supported membranes. It also leads to a new mobility & changeability. A new understanding of nature is forming under one aspect of high performance form (also called classical form) which unites aesthetic & ethical viewpoints. Tomorrow\'s architecture will again be minimal architecture, an architecture of the self-education & self-optimization processes suggested by human beings. (Frei Otto & Bodo Rasch in their foreword of this book) In 1992 the Bavarian branch of the Deutscher Werkbund awarded its first prize to Frei Otto, undoubtedly the most successful & many-sided protagonist of modern light construction, & with it a request to nominate a meritorious person to whom the prize could be passed on, & to design a joint exhibition with that person. Frei Otto chose his pupil Bodo Rasch, who had realized Otto\'s theories particularly in other cultures.