When Frei Otto, a visiting professor at Washington University in 1958, met Buckminster Fuller, who was a teaching professor there, for the first time, their encounter began with a heated conversation about “wide-span constructions”. An unusually intense engagement for newly acquainted colleagues perhaps, but these masters of material reduction and minimal construction, already familiar with each other’s work, knew no other way. Sharing a mutual fascination with nature and biological form, the two genius designers had both dedicated their lives to realising lightweight structures embodying the notion of “building more with less”, each in their own distinctive single-minded manner. Later on, when Frei Otto moved back to Germany, they would meet again, this time at the Institute for Lightweight Structures (IL), a worthwhile journey for Fuller as the IL was were all the magic was happening at the time. Think tank, design laboratory, publishing office, lecture hall and community of like minds, it was the perfect venue for the two ex-colleagues to meet and take up from where they last left off. I (sf)
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Milan X Triennale paperboard domes before assembly in 1954. (Source: aaa-laboratory.blogspot.de)
Photo: © ILEK, Stuttgart
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