RARE \"German Architect\" Frei Otto Hand Signed FDC Dated 1957 For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "German Architect" Frei Otto Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1957. 

ES-4158E

Frei Paul Otto (German: [ˈfʁaɪ ˈʔɔto]; 31 May 1925

– 9 March 2015) was a German architect and structural engineer noted

for his use of lightweight structures, in particular tensile and membrane structures, including the roof of

the Olympic Stadium in

Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics. Otto

won the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2006 and was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in

2015, shortly before his death. Otto was born in Siegmar, Germany, and grew up in Berlin. He studied architecture in Berlin before being drafted into the Luftwaffe as a fighter pilot in the last years of World War II. He was interned in a prisoner of war camp

near Chartres (France) and with his aviation engineering training

and lack of material and an urgent need for housing, began experimenting

with tents for shelter. After the war he studied briefly in the

US and visited Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright. He

began a private practice in Germany in 1952. His saddle-shaped cable-net music

pavilion at the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Garden Exposition)

in Kassel brought him his first significant attention. He

earned a doctorate in tensioned constructions in 1954. Otto

specialised in lightweight tensile and membrane structures, and pioneered advances in

structural mathematics and civil engineering. He founded the Institute for

Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart in 1964 and headed the institute until his

retirement as university professor. Major works include the West German

Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967 and the roof of the 1972 Munich Olympic Arena. He has lectured

worldwide and taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he

also designed some of the research facilities buildings of the school's forest

campus in Hooke Park. Until

his death, Otto remained active as an architect and engineer, and as consultant

to his protégé Mahmoud Bodo Rasch for

a number of projects in the Middle East. One of his more recent projects was

his work with Shigeru Ban on the Japanese Pavilion

at Expo 2000 with a roof structure made entirely of paper,

and together with SL Rasch GmbH Special and Lightweight Structures he

designed a convertible roof for the Venezuelan Pavilion. In an effort to memorialise the September 11 attacks and

its victims as early as 2002, Otto envisioned the two footprints of the World Trade Center buildings

covered with water and surrounded by trees; his plan includes a world map

embedded in the park with countries at war marked with lights and a

continuously updated board announcing the number of people killed in war from

11 September 2001, onward. Otto

died on 9 March 2015; he was to be publicly announced as the winner of the

2015 Pritzker Prize on 23

March but his death meant the committee announced his award on 10 March. Otto himself had been told earlier that

he had won the prize by the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, Martha Thorne. He was reported to have said, "I’ve never

done anything to gain this prize. Prize winning is not the goal of my life. I

try to help poor people, but what shall I say here — I'm very happy."