During the last twenty years, the topic of form has become one of the most controversial issues in public and professional discussions about architecture. Ever since the Digital Turn, it has been exacerbated, since computer-aided design makes it possible, rapidly and effortlessly, to create extraordinary and emblematic buildings. These icons are threatening to become banal and often express little but their own form. Hardly anyone reflected on this as intensely as the 2015 Pritzker Prize winner Frei Otto, an innovative explorer on the boundary between architecture and civil engineering. His concept of form-finding is aimed at preventing any process of designing or shaping. This raises questions that are closely related to current debates on architectural form. This book aims to re-examine the issue by expanding on the exemplary case of Frei Otto. The subject is approached from varyingly wide perspectives, ranging from pathways to form in engineering research and in experimental model-making to the ideological-critical reflections on form by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas.
Contents
Pathways to Form. Frei Otto and Beyond
Sonja Hildebrand, Elisabeth Bergmann
"A man a-riding upon nawthin". Light Structures and New Mobility Cultures Around 1900
Kurt Moser
Pensare in piccolo per costruire in grande. Teoria, prassi e cultura del modello in scala ridotta nella ricerca della forma strutturale nel XX secolo
Gabriele Neri
Capturing the Incalculable. Frei Otto's Experimental Models
Daniela Fabricius
Anti-Monumental Anti-Nationalist National Monumentality. The Postwar Politics of Form-Finding
Sean Keller
La "filosofia architettonica" di Frei Otto. I concetti di forma, estetica ed etica e la loro ricezione
Elisabeth Bergmann
Stuttgart SmartShell. A Full-Scale Adaptive Shell Structure
Stefan Neuhauser, Martin Weickgenannt, Christoph Witte, Walter Haase, Oliver Sawodny, Werner Sobek
Le costruzioni in legno dell'IBOIS. Forme curvate, intessute, intrecciate: una conversazione con Yves Weinand
Elisabeth Bergmann
Towards an Expanded Concept of Form. Gottfried Semper on Ancient Projectiles
Sonja Hildebrand
Within the Technical lmage. An Alternative Reading of Contemporary Swiss-German Architecture
Roberta Grignolo
Rem Koolhaas and Oswald Mathias Ungers. A Plausible Relationship Between the Formal and the Social?
Lara Schrijver
Index of names