Christian F. Otto (1940–2013)

Abstract

Celebrated scholar of eighteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, guiding light of the History of Architecture and Urban Development program at Cornell University, two-term JSAH editor, gifted teacher, generous mentor, and friend to generations of designers and historians—Christian Otto was fully immersed in the work he loved when a yearlong encounter with pancreatic cancer brought it prematurely to a close. He is remembered for his prodigious intellectual gifts, his warmly animated demeanor, and the generosity with which he shared both in the many spheres he inhabited with grace, intensity and dedication. The geographic focus of Chris’s written oeuvre and the core around which his broad teaching expertise developed was Mittel Europe—from the prince-bishoprics of greater Bavaria in the waning years of the Holy Roman Empire to the productive tumult of Weimar-era Stuttgart and Berlin. He made signal contributions in both areas, bringing to the English-speaking reader the first (and still only) monographic study of the brilliant churches of Balthasar Neumann and, in collaboration with the late Richard Pommer, the first comprehensive exploration of the storied Weissenhof Siedlung —a 1927 housing exhibition that assembled on a single site the pioneering work of recognized luminaries and soon-to-be protagonists of a nascent modern movement. It was Chris’s special genius to recognize the distinctive architectural strategies that linked these disparate scenarios; beneath the florid embellishments of the Central European pilgrimage church and the restrained severity of the machine a habiter Chris detected a common and compelling leitmotif: the melding of skeletalized structure and harnessed light to dematerialize form and lend to space a positive volumetric presence. If Le Corbusier’s interiors at Weissenhof “were defined less by walls or planes … and more by light on forms,”1 so too at Neumann’s 1740s church at Vierzehnheiligen, “the interior is everywhere open to light which floods in, reducing …