During my time studying architecture the architect-engineer and Pritzker Prize winner Frei Otto was a full time professor at my alma mater, the University of Stuttgart and his Institute of Institute for Lightweight Structures was a flagship for innovation. He designed structures guided by gravity not ego, and like Buckminster Fuller before him he was guided by the credo of doing more with less. In spite of the similarity with the modernist credo of "less is more", he also broke with the prevailing modern dogma of the Bauhaus box. 

This was well before desktop computers were at hand to calculate loads of complex shapes. Even though Otto employed main frame computing for architecture in a first of his time, he was mainly an experimenter who tested efficient shapes via models and natural precedents such as spider webs (the ultimate tensile structures) or soap bubbles (which enclose a maximum volume with a minimum of material). He filtered into the minds of us architecture students almost via osmosis propelled by his charismatic persona. He represented categories that were intriguing but also foreign to most of us at the time and only would become popular decades later such as sustainability, biomimicry or biometric design, and parametric design. One could argue that.... READ FULL ARTICLE HERE