A Window in History: An Architect at the Crossroads to Globalization - Softcover

Grube, Joachim

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798662917200

Verlag: Independently published, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Joachim Grube has been in the forefront of international architectural design for over 50 years, working on projects in over 35 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. His absorbing memoir tells the story behind some of these projects, whose success required overcoming logistical challenges posed by remote locations but also bridging cultural differences. Grube also shares his fascinating personal history. Born in 1932 in the Free City of Danzig, his family fled to Denmark in the chaos at the end of World War II and returned to postwar Germany as, in his words, “refugees in our own country.” His studies took him to Hamburg and West Berlin in the 1950s, where he met and fell in love with his cousin Liz Rauschning, whose family had fled to the United States during the war. They soon married and moved to her adopted home town of Portland, Oregon. This was only the beginning of Grube’s travels; while Portland would remain home from then on, his work has taken him and his family all over the world—first to Khartoum, where he worked for UNESCO’s Regional School Planning Center for Africa. His collaborations and friendships with local architects established a pattern for the way he and his partners at YGH in Portland approached their overseas work.During the postcolonial era a window opened for collaborations with indigenous architects and engineers through staff exchanges between the Portland office and those of their local partners, a pattern that encouraged friendships and the experience of different cultures, living conditions, and political traditions. Even at the dawn of the internet age, traveling to each other’s home bases was essential to the communication between participants as they planned hospitals, offices, agricultural research stations, schools and universities from Sudan to Nigeria, Kazakhstan to Angola, Ecuador to Afghanistan.A key challenge to closing the economic gap between industrialized and developing nations is to create living conditions that can assure the younger generation of a bright future in their own countries. Grube believes that architects can contribute to this by teaming up with their international colleagues; his autobiography, combining a fascinating account of the working life of an architect with reminiscences of a fulfilling personal life, aims to provide a positive example of where the road to globalization can lead.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independently published
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798662917200
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg