To build means to make architecture real on the borders of knowledge.
Interpretation
Building involves turning architectural ideas into tangible structures that expand our understanding.
Frei Otto's quote emphasizes the role of architecture as a transformative process that makes theoretical concepts manifest. By 'building,' we not only create physical structures but also push the boundaries of what we know, leveraging creativity and intellect to explore new possibilities within the realm of design and construction.
In practice
This quote could be used in an architectural presentation to inspire students about the importance of knowledge in design.
My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.
Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?
Buildings are 'humane' only when they promote peaceful human co-existence.
Most architects think in drawings, or did think in drawings; today, they think on the computer monitor. I always tried to think three dimensionally. The interior eye of the brain should be not flat but three dimensional so that everything is an object in space. We are not living in a two-dimensional world.
I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself, dissolving yourself, and then sniff, sniff, sniff - being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.
THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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