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.

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?

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.

My architecture is the architecture of survival.

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