Matilda McQuaid is Exhibitions Curator and Head of the Textiles Department at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, and until 2001, was Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the author of numerous essays on architecture, textiles and fibre art in journals and museum publications, including a contribution to Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (Museum of Modern Art, 2002), which she also edited.
Frei Otto is an eminent architect based in Germany, who has pioneered research in lightweight membranes and innovative structures. He founded the Development Centre for Lightweight Construction in Berlin in 1957, which later became the Institute for Lightweight Structures in Stuttgart. He collaborated with Shigeru Ban on the Japan Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany.