Ivan Štraus

Ivan Štraus (24 June 1928 – 24 August 2018) was a Bosnian architect.

Life Born in 1928, in Kremna, Zlatibor county, Serbia, to a Slovenian father and mother from Herzegovina. He identified as a "Bosnian of Slovenian and Herzegovinian descent".

Štraus grew up in Banja Luka. He started architectural studies in Zagreb in 1947 and graduated in 1958 from the Technology Faculty of the University of Sarajevo in the city of Sarajevo, where he taught as an assistant. From 1952 he began making deals for participating architectural tenders, and from 1959 to 1961 and then from 1965 to 1984 he worked for the Arhitekt studio in Sarajevo. Since then he has won 30 major awards for architecture and has won many national and international tenders.

Štraus wrote this in his diary as he watched the Unis towers burn on June 8, 1992, at the start of the Bosnian war: "I watched with immeasurable sadness. (...) The moments of its construction and my pride of the two (towers) passed in front of my eyes like on film roll, while one of them lit up tonight like a torch."

In his last years, Štraus suffered injustice due to a process he undertook against the current owners of the Unis towers in Sarajevo (now Unitic). Štraus sued for not adhering to his original plans during their reconstruction and lost the case. Repeated requests to the owners of Unitic to forgive the debt due to the lost case were unanimously declined.

According to Oslobođenje, "His architectural masterpieces and inexhaustible creativity shaped one architectural era in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Academician Strauss gave the city Neymarian pearls, some of which, like the Holiday Inn or UNITIC, became symbols of the city on Miljacka."

He died on 24 August 2018 in Sarajevo, exactly two months after turning 90 years old in June. He was buried four days later, on 28 August at the "Bare" Cemetery in Sarajevo.

Work

His major projects include:

Professor Nedžad Kurto, architect, wrote for "Odjek" No. 23, Sarajevo, 1986:"Never burdened with a side effect, every architectural task solves exclusively at the level of intellectual and cognitive approach. Therefore, Štraus' architecture can not be loved or disliked, liked to like to like it, to discover and interpret it in its richness of thought expression. Today one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary Yugoslav architecture, and his previous work is certainly a significant contribution to contemporary architecture in general. "