Ivan Straus was born on July 24th, 1928 in Zlatibor in Serbia and died on August 24th, 2018. His father was Slovenian and his mother was from Herzegovina.
He started his architectural studies in Zagreb in 1947 and graduated in 1958 from the technical faculty in Sarajevo. From 1952 he began making deals for participating in architectural tenders. Since then, he has won 30 major awards for architecture and has won many national and international tenders.
Some of the most important buildings in Sarajevo include Unis towers, BH Electric Power Building, and Holliday Inn hotel.
Also, he designed the Museum of Aviation in Belgrade.
Since 1984, he was a member of Academy of Sciences and Arts of BiH. On 2012, he became the foreign member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
His architectural work was presented on solo exhibitions in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Skopje and Zagreb. In 1986/87 was organized a retrospection of his work through 25 years work in Sarajevo, Skopje, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Novi Sad. He was a frequent participant in the collective architectural exhibitions: “Yugoslav Architecture 1977-1984” in New York, “11 Prominent Architects of Yugoslavia” in Belgrade and “Architects-Academics of Bosnia and Herzegovina” in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Budapest and Maribor.
He also issued a series of scientific books and articles on architecture. In 1977 he published a chronicle “New Architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina” and he was one of the authors of the book “The Architecture of the Twentieth Century” in the edition of “Art in Yugoslavia” in 1987. In the same year, he published “15 Years of Bosnian and Herzegovinian Architecture”. In 1991 he published a chronicle “The Architecture of Yugoslavia 1945-1990”. He published his diary “The Architect and the Barbarians” in French and Bosnian (1995). A chronicle “Architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina 1945-1995” was published in 1998. ANUBiH published his monograph entitled ‘’Ivan Štraus, architect/‘52-’02“ in 2002. His latest book published in Sarajevo in 2010 is entitled “99 Architects of Sarajevo Circle 1930-1990”.
