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Design grid for the book "Frei Otto – Spannweiten" as well as drafts for double pages with projects.

On the occasion of his 100th birthday on May 31 of this year, Frei Otto is once again being celebrated with new publications, symposia and exhibitions – and rightly so. Less prominent, however, are some of his companions, as well as the question of how Otto appeared in their eyes and how people from his circle were perceived or categorised in public and professional discourse. One character from this network was Conrad Roland: student, collaborator and critic. His view of Otto oscillated between reverent admiration, productive friction and a sometimes sharp distance from the self-presentation of the supposed great genius _1.

When Conrad Roland first entered the studio of the then still largely unknown Frei Otto in Berlin-Zehlendorf in May 1961, he spoke in retrospect almost 40 years later of a "great moment and hour of fate". ₂ The "Entwicklungsstätte für den Leichtbau” (EL) the place where soap bubbles became building forms and spider webs served as models, left a lasting impression on the young architect. Roland had just returned from Chicago, where he had worked and studied with Mies van der Rohe. Still under the impression of Mies' disciplined rationality, Otto's organic-experimental structures must have been almost like a culture shock for the young returnee.

To qualify for a doctorate, Conrad Roland had to complete extra coursework in addition to his master's degree at the IIT. Roland decided to attend a seminar on lightweight construction and tensile structures at the Technical University of Berlin and, fascinated by Otto's lightweight textile membranes, sought a personal conversation. On this occasion, Otto gave him a portfolio with hundreds of sketches for suspended structures, which Roland was allowed to use scientifically. In 1962, this resulted in EL-Mitteilungen No. 8 entitled "Mehrgeschossige zugbeanspruchte Konstruktionen ".

Over time and over several joint projects, a classic student-master relationship developed into a tense constellation that was characterized by fascination, but also by deep differences in the understanding of design.  In a letter to the art historian Udo Kultermann, Roland writes dryly but pointedly:

"We were constantly arguing, because I was trying to achieve Miesian exactness and consistency, while Frei Otto has little sense for that (unfortunately, one would have wished it for the German Pavilion!)." ₃

However, Roland had to admit to himself that he and his work were repeatedly significantly influenced by Frei Otto. The latter not only supported him in his research on hanging houses and spatial networks with sketches and preliminary studies, but also provided him with financial resources. The joint work resulted in an ambitious project: a comprehensive monograph on Otto's work. Roland worked for two years on the book "Frei Otto – Spannweiten", published in 1965, which is still considered an early, fundamental documentation of his principles of lightweight construction and helped him and his ideas gain international visibility.

But the price was high. In several letters to his patron and confidante Phyllis Lambert, Roland complained of being overwhelmed, frustrated and feeling like he had to penetrate and organize someone else's work instead of his own:

„I have had serious fights and trouble with Frei Otto, I am sick and tired of him and his objects. His arrogance is just not at all justified, he is so terribly taken by himself, he thinks, that he is so marvellous, such a great genius, these personal aspects are embarrassing to me [...] He just makes nice models and talks nonsense. [...] I have put almost two years of work into this book, trying to make his mostly confused ideas clear.“ ₄

Roland got bogged down between his own aspirations and someone else's work and increasingly felt the project as a burden. This was certainly one of the reasons why he was unable to advance his own research as planned and eventually dropped out of his dissertation, for which he had received a grant from the Graham Foundation:

„What makes me so terribly bitter is the fact, that I have worked really hard for those two years […] and on the top of it, that I am about to lose the greatest chance of my life, the Graham project […] and at least 15,000 Marks loss of money.“ ₅

He also repeatedly found that his sketches were used without correct attribution or attributed to Frei Otto and that his own name faded behind the fame of the "pioneer of lightweight construction". He was all the more relieved when the project was over, even if not as lucrative as he had hoped:

„The book is FFIINNIISSHHEEDDDDD. So am I. […] Well, I am still alive despite all that lousy terrible miserable disgusting annoying curvy pseudosexy bloodless badly done sickening Frei Otto stuff.“ ₆

With his precisely crafted, carefully illustrated and analytically well-founded book "Spannweiten", Roland made a decisive contribution to making Otto's visionary ideas known to an international professional audience. His own innovative designs, for example for flexible residential structures in suspended cities or a 120-storey spiral high-rise, on the other hand, received much less attention. While Otto wrote architectural history with his buildings and posthumously received the Pritzker Prize for his life's work in 2015, Roland remained largely unknown to the general public. Competition entries such as the sports stadium in Abu Dhabi, which was developed together with Jörn-Peter Schmidt-Thomsen, and which would be comparable to the Olympic roof in Munich in terms of dimension and constructive standards, were never realised.

After a longer period without contact, Roland sent a lovingly designed greeting card by fax for Otto's 70th birthday. The gesture of a man who, marked by illness and living in seclusion on his macadamia plantation in Hawaii, perhaps viewed his relationship with Otto more mildly and conciliatory in retrospect.

"You have made the world a little more beautiful and a little lighter – BEAUTIFULLY LIGHT. [...] Less visible, but even more far-reaching, are the ideas and questions that you have sown in your many students. This has resulted in numerous but very different plants; some tall, strong and beautiful, impressive; others more delicate and of hidden beauty; still others a little strange, perhaps; and then also those plants that would have dried up better ..." ₇

How Roland would classify himself among the plant types described and which other people from Frei Otto's environment he had in mind when he used the metaphor remains open.

In any case, Roland's decision to give his estate to the Archive for Architecture and Engineering | saai was consistent – in "good neighbourhood" ₈ with Frei Otto, whose estate is also located there, and "in very good company" ₉ with Fritz Leonhardt, the "father" of many suspended bridges, cable-stayed bridges and television towers worldwide. A deliberate positioning on an equal footing with those whose work is closely linked to his own, but has been much more publicly noticed. However, this step not only has a personal level, but is also scientifically valuable. The archive becomes a dialogical space, because estates are particularly revealing when they are not indexed in isolation from each other. Networks become visible, references identifiable – and with them alternatives to the often one-dimensional explanations of architectural genesis. An estate thus becomes a source not only about a person, but also about a network of relationships, a movement of thought or an architectural milieu.

MG, 27.05.2025

On the occasion of Frei Otto's 70th birthday in 1995, Conrad Roland designed a very personal greeting card with the motif of a spacenet.