Faculty Profile

Christian Otto’s education has been mostly in the classroom and on the street.  The classroom training occurred mostly in New York City, through high school, with a hiatus at Swarthmore for college, then to Columbia for my M.A. and Ph.D.   The second has taken him­­—and continues to do so­—throughout Europe and America, with short extensions to the Near East and China.   These travels comprise his formative education, which began with family when he was young, and continue to the present, often with family, friends, and students.  As he became increasingly interested in buildings, cities, and landscapes, what he found compelling about them were their aesthetic and cultural conditions—the aesthetics shaped by culture, cultural conditions lodged within the formal. This focus was sharped by the extraordinary scholars at Columbia with whom he studied, among them Rudolf Wittkower, Meyer Schapiro, George Collins, Edgar Kaufmann, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who shared with him their exhilaration in learning, and imbued him with those responsibilities inherent in rigorous thought, demanding research, and engaged teaching.

Otto’s work as scholar and teacher has primarily focused on 18th-century Central Europe, and on 20th-century Europe and America. What he finds compelling in the 18th century are the revolutionary challenges to tradition in sacred and secular building by architects such as Neumann, Fischer von Erlach, the Dientzenhofers, Asams, and Zimmermanns on the one hand, and on the other the radical shift in urban design from the Versailles model, especially in those cities influenced by members of the extensive Schönborn family, from Vienna to Würzburg. His research in the 20th century examines the Modernist project, its ideologies and politics and social milieu, its Enlightenment legacy, its inheritance of 19th-century theory, the problematics of the metropolis, the creation of a contemporary domestic culture, and the horror of the Holocaust. He has also been intrigued by how these issues continue to animate contemporary practice.  Woven throughout all of these investigations, whether addressing 18th or 20th-century materials, are matters of method and historiography—how have we and how do we define our purposes and the possibilities of doing history work.

Some of his publications in these areas are Space Into Light, the Churches of Balthasar Neumann (1979), Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture (1991), together with Richard Pommer, and The Utility of Splendor, Ceremony, Social Life, and Architecture at the Court of Bavaria, 1600 - 1800, a study by one of his students, Samuel John Klingenmith, that he and another of his students, Mark. R. Ashton, prepared for publication. For a decade he has served as editor of first the Newsletter and then the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Of great importance to Otto is sharing his scholarship and experiences with his students, through the traditional academic means of classes, seminars, and independent study, but also through summer and between-semester programs, exhibitions and excursions, and adult programs sponsored by Cornell and the National Endowment for the Arts.