Otto trained as an architect in Berlin, was drafted as a Luftwaffe pilot and spent 1945 to 1947 as a prisoner of war near Chartres, where a shortage of materials pushed him toward the tent structures he built for fellow prisoners — the accidental origin of a lifelong subject. He opened his own Berlin practice in 1952 and completed a doctorate on tensioned structures in 1954, the same year he began finding form for cable nets and membranes through soap-film and hanging-chain models rather than calculation alone. He founded the Institute for Lightweight Structures at Stuttgart in 1964. His West German pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal, with Rolf Gutbrod, led directly to the Munich Olympic roof; the Multihalle at Mannheim followed in 1975. He died in Leonberg in March 2015, a day before the Pritzker jury announced his prize.
