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When Alvar Aalto presented a brand new technique for manufacturing his timber furniture out of “wooden macaroni” in Paris in 1950, Frei Otto was fascinated. This demonstration that it was technically feasible to produce a wooden form that looked as if it had grown naturally, led him to his own ruminations on similar techniques. The following year, in an article for Bauwelt, Otto mused upon the Finnish architect’s mysterious technique, for Aalto never revealed his secret: “Aalto remains silent. No one knows how he does it. He has not revealed anything even to his friend and countryman Eero Saarinen, nor does the third of that bunch, Charles Eames, know how.”
Without access to a recipe, Otto nevertheless suggested some of his own ideas on the use of revolutionary wood compounds. A number of years later he published his designs for beds and chairs in the same magazine, showing examples of cloth and wood constructions adhering to the principles of his large-scale tensile structures. The designs were intended to be waterproof and appropriate for use outdoors, enabling the expansion of living space into the garden. The only object produced in greater numbers however was the Montreal Chair of 1967, designed for Otto’s German pavilion at the World’s Fair that same year and developed according to similar principles. I (Franziska Stein)
A prototype of the stacking chair designed by Frei Otto for the German Pavilion, Expo 67. (Source: www.architonic.com)
Some of Otto’s sketches that originally appeared in “Neue Bauwelt”, issue 20, 1951.
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