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Otzen, Johannes
(b Sieseby, nr Eckenförde, 8 Oct 1839; d Berlin, 8 June 1911). German architect, teacher and writer. He studied building in Hannover with Conrad Wilhelm Hase, whose extensive use of plain brickwork, traditional in north Germany, he later imitated. While still an assistant in the building administration of Schleswig-Holstein he won the competition (1867) for the Johanniskirche (1868–73) in Altona, near Hamburg, but after this success he turned to other kinds of work. In Berlin he designed villas (c. 1870) in the suburb of Lichterfelde. These were plain, practical buildings, almost without historical idiom, in the manner taught at Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Berlin Bauakademie. In addition to creating Italianate town and country houses in Berlin (1870), Sternfelde (1872–4) and Topper (1874), Otzen produced Gothic Revival commercial buildings for the more traditional trading towns, including Flensburg (1868) and Thorn (1881). In 1882–3 he designed his own grandiose villa in Wannsee, near Berlin, which was given a strikingly picturesque tower but was otherwise built of brick, sparsely decorated with carved stone devoid of historical idiom. From 1878 he was a professor at the Technische Hochschule, Berlin, where in 1885 the Königliche Akademie der Künste provided him with a new studio for the study of medieval architecture, reflecting his increasing activity as a designer of churches.
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