Celebrated for his elegant tensile structures—most notably the 1972 Olympic Stadium in Munich and the West German Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo—German architect and engineer Frei Otto was awarded the 2015 Pritzker Prize for Architecture on Tuesday. The announcement was made nearly two weeks early, after Otto died on Monday at age 89.
In a statement, the prize jury made note of Otto’s zeal for multidisciplinary study and his practice, which bridged the worlds of academia, environmentalism, and engineering. They also indicated Otto’s eclectic sources of inspiration, which included birds, soap bubbles, and the delicate beauty and surprising strength of spiderwebs.
As Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright points out, this year’s Pritzker news comes on the heels of a resurgence of lightweight, tentlike architecture in the popular conscience. Last week, tech titan Google revealed a scheme for its new campus in Menlo Park, California, masterminded by 2011 AD Innovator Bjarke Ingels’s firm and London’s Heatherwick Studio, that bears a striking similarity to Otto’s membranous designs.
An award ceremony is set to take place in Miami on May 15 at the New World Center, designed by 1989 Pritzker winner Frank Gehry. Otto follows 2014 laureate Shigeru Ban, a former collaborator, in receiving the award. He is the 40th recipient of the prize and only the second from Germany.
