Christian Friedrich Otto died on March 27, 2013 after living for 14 months with pancreatic cancer.

Chris was born in New York City on June 16, 1940. He was a lifelong Quaker and member of Flushing Monthly Meeting. He was educated at Friends Seminary, Swarthmore College, the University of the Saar, Saarbrücken, Germany and Columbia University. He taught briefly at Vassar College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before taking a position teaching the history of architecture in Cornell University's Department of Architecture. He taught the history of architecture and urbanism to design and history students from 1970 until his death. Through his illness, he continued to teach and meet with graduate students, research and write. His areas of research were eighteenth-century Central European architecture, modern architecture and urbanism, and New York, a city he loved as a native, a scholar and a walker in the city.

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