Henry Jacob Cowan

Henry Jacob Cowan (born August 21, 1919 in Glogau , † July 15, 2007 in Sydney ) was an Australian civil engineer .

Cowan was the son of a country doctor and was sent to England by his parents in 1934 because of the persecution of Jews in Germany by the Nazis. He went to school in Brighton and studied civil engineering at the University of Manchester with a bachelor's degree in 1938 with honors and a master's degree in 1940. He was then interned as an enemy alien and enlisted in the military. During the Second World War he worked as a mine clearer for the Royal Engineers. After being seriously wounded, he was released in 1945. In 1946 he was an assistant at Cardiff University and in 1948 lecturer at the University of Sheffield , where he received his doctorate. In 1954 he became Professor of Architectural Science at the University of Sydney , the first such chair worldwide. He was one of the founders of this discipline between architecture and civil engineering, which was proposed by RIBA in England for its architectural training in the early 1950s, as more and more knowledge of civil engineering and strength theory was required in everyday work.

In 1958 he founded the journal Architectural Science Review and from 1966 he published the Architectural Science Series at Elsevier .

In 1963 he received an honorary doctorate in Sheffield and in 2003 in Sydney. In 1983 he became OA . He was an honorary member of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects .

He received the Chapman Medal and Monash Medal from the Australian Institution of Engineers.

He married Renate Cowan, a nurse in Sheffield in 1952, with whom he had two daughters. Since one daughter was disabled, they were involved in the rehabilitation of the disabled.

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : History of Structural Analysis. In search of balance , Ernst & Sohn , 2nd edition 2016, p. 984 (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03134-6

Fonts

• The Theory of prestressed design, London: Macmillan 1956
• Reinforced and prestressed concrete in torsion, London: Arnold 1965
• An Historical Outline of Architectural Science, Elsevier 1966
• Models in Architecture, Elsevier 1968
• Architectural Structures. An Introduction to Structural Mechanics, Amsterdam: Elsevier 1971
• Dictionary of Architectural Science, London: Applied Science Publ. 1973
• The master builders: A history of structural and environmental design from ancient Egypt to the nineteenth century, Wiley 1977
• Science and building: structural and environmental design in the 19th and 20th centuries, Wiley 1978
• A Contradiction in Terms, University of Sydney and Hermitage Press 1993 (autobiography)
• with Peter Smith: Dictionary of Architectural and Building Terminology, 4th Edition, Routledge 2004

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Sydney