Arthur Dürst

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Arthur Dürst

Arthur Dürst (born October 6, 1926 in Hauptwil ; † December 28, 2000 in Zurich ) was a Swiss geographer and international cartography historian .

Life

Arthur Dürst was born as the only child of Johannes Dürst (1894–1954) and Flora. Brunner (1896–1950) was born in Hauptwil ( Canton Thurgau ). He spent his youth in Naus above Sargans , where his parents Knappenhaus of mine Gonzen led.

Arthur Dürst attended primary and secondary school in Sargans and from 1941 to 1947 the canton school in Chur (Matura type C), which was not a matter of course for a child from a humble background.

His achievements enabled him to study geography at the University of Zurich from 1947 , which he completed in 1958 with his diploma thesis The technical foundations of aerial photo interpretation . Dürst's minor subjects included astronomy , physics , geology , economic geography, and mathematics . He later expanded his studies to specialize in meteorology , ethnology and cartography . To finance his studies, he worked from 1951 to 1955 as an assistant in the Geography Institute under Hans Boesch and from 1956 to 1960 at the Cartographic Institute of the ETH Zurich under Eduard Imhof .

His diverse interests and his work at the universities enabled Arthur Dürst to participate as a scientist in the Everest expedition of the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research .

In 1961 he got a job as the main teacher of geography at Department I of the Höhere Töchterschule (from 1976: canton school) on the Hohen Promenade in Zurich . Until his retirement on February 15, 1992, he remained loyal to the school and was able to incorporate his research and work on map history into his teaching activities. From 1970 to 1983 Arthur Dürst was chief of the artillery weather service of the Swiss Army with the rank of major in the army staff. In 1992 and 1994, respectively, he ended his part-time lecturing as a lecturer at the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich, where Dürst had been giving lectures on the history of cartography and the geographical worldview since 1979.

On September 17, 1962, he married Josefa Rangger in Zurich; together they had two sons, Georg (* 1963) and Matthias (* 1968). On January 5, 2001 Arthur Dürst was buried in close family circles in the Enzenbühl cemetery in Zurich.

Scientific work

In 1977 Arthur Dürst founded a working group for map history within the Swiss Society for Cartography and in 1990 co-founded the specialist magazine for map history Cartographica Helvetica .

His actual specialty was the history of Zurich cartography. He edited facsimiles and commentaries on cards by Hans Conrad Gyger , Johann Jakob Scheuchzer , Jos Murer , Johannes Müller and Johannes Wild and dedicated a study to the Zurich instrument makers Philipp Eberhard (1563-1627) and Leonhard Zubler (1563-1611).

He achieved international renown as the editor of facsimiles of portolan cards , the Cosmographia of Claudius Ptolemy , the only surviving solar instrument by Sebastian Münster and the map of Europe by Gerhard Mercator . His last major work was the publication of the so-called Atlas Suworow a few weeks before his death in 2000. In total, he wrote around a hundred relevant works.

He was also in charge of four map history exhibitions and their catalogs and accompanying publications: In Innsbruck (1966) about Peter Anich , in Zurich and St. Gallen (1978) and in 1994/95 in Zurich Die Ostschweiz in the image of the early map makers in the Landesmuseum , on behalf of the Landesmuseum , the Zurich State Archives and the Zurich Central Library . His other activities included invitations to numerous international lecture series, lectures and research work in Switzerland and abroad.

For his work, Arthur Dürst received honorary membership of the Eastern Switzerland Geographical Society (1978), the Geographical Society Zurich (1989), of which he was also a member of the board, and the appointment as scientific advisor for cartography and surveying at the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland (1994) , the Swiss Society for Cartography (1995) and the Zurich Section of the Swiss Heritage Protection (1997).

His study library for cartography - general and Asia library with about 6,000 books - gave thirsty to complement the map collection of Walter Blumer his home canton Glarus .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography on the website of the Dürst brothers , accessed on November 15, 2008

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Thirst, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dürst-Rangger, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss geographer and map historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Hauptwil-Gottshaus
DATE OF DEATH December 28, 2000
Place of death Zurich