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.
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
The essence of style is how you live your life
If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!
I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.
Through most of my career, I've made a decent living making movies no one wants to see.
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
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