The award was planned, as usual, to be announced at the end of March, but the death of Otto made its own adjustments: the 40th laureate of the award, the second German architect who received it (after Gottfried Boehm) only did not live a little before the award ceremony and before his 90th birthday (both should have been celebrated in May 2015).
Representatives of the Pritzker Foundation managed to visit Fry Otto in his house-workshop near Stuttgart and inform him about the award of the prize, to which he replied that “I have never done anything to receive this prize … in the remaining time I will continue to do what I have always done - help to humanity."
The name "Fry" is translated from German as "free", and it was the absolute freedom of creativity and experiment that inscribed Otto in the history of modern architecture. He was always looking for new ways to achieve the maximum possible goals with the minimum means: hence his passion for lightweight constructions, which brought him fame. He began experimenting with limited resources back in a camp for German prisoners of war near Chartres, where he was commissioned to design outbuildings (19-year-old Otto was sent to the front at the end of 1944, and soon he was captured) and continued his whole life, collaborating with specialists a wide variety of professions, including historians and philosophers, referring to Gothic and biomimetics, computer design in the late 1960s, and the principles of "sustainability" before it even existed.
Light, often transparent structures were for him a response to the massive monumentality of Nazi structures. Otto's designs reflected a modernist fascination with progress and a belief in the ability of architecture to help people. Not all of his plans came true, but he did not lose optimism until the last days: like freedom, the theme of happiness became a cross-cutting one for his life and work. He spoke about this in his interview, which he gave to our portal in the summer of 2014: being a happy person, Fry Otto wanted to make all people happier.
