Sarajevo I.Štraus

I would like for you to take a minute of your time, so you can read the story about a great man, therefore the art will be clear to you.
My inspiration to tell this story through my art, comes from a great man, a builder of better tomorrow, and a winner of more than 30 architecture awards.
Ivan Straus is a complete architect and an artistic person. Firstly, he is a man of ideas and a space creator, but as well an architect-builder and architect-publicist. Exactly in the period of his peak as an artist, the shapes of his structures are more confident, and the perfection of details is more and more enhanced, as well as the contribution to the world of architecture became richer.
City in a Hotel
Hotel Holiday Inn has been sketched as a city in a hotel, which you dont need to go out of. It was built to receive the guests of the 14th Winter Olympic Games, but in the 1983. the brown and yellow color of the Hotel has shown its true identity, and the public has been left astonished by its extravagancy.
- I remember that everyone thought I am joking. - Straus mentioned in one of his interviews. I’ve always wanted to add colors, so its much happier, in contrary to gray colors, becuse the architects in that age have been afraid of using colors. Everything was gray, you couldnt make a mistake, sometimes even white, because anyways it will turn gray through time. Holiday Inn and UNIS skyscrapers, that is a composition, it is not one object and another one separate, it is a true composition, one close to the other one, and thats why the glass is of blue color on the skyscrapers, and on the Holiday inn it is yellow. But why ? Because those two colors, when they merge they create green as we know, its like a “prank”, Strauss added with a laugh, like he made some kind of a problem which nobody knows about yet. On the opening of the hotel in October of 1983., was as well Juan Antionio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic commitee at that time, and in the comfort of the hotel rooms, restaurants, the nightclub and casino as well have been famous stars such as Kirk Douglas, Elton John, King Olaf V and Karl XVI Gustav.
On the 1. September 1991., Strauss retires and starts writing a journal. He couldnt even think that his idea of writing the construction will turn into writing of destruction, as he wrote. The title of the daily writing, which has been published the first time in Paris, than in Sarajevo, was “unexpected and unplanned” - Architects and Barbarians.
“Going to the balcony in 3 am was a shock. Tonight the barbarians have set on fire one of the UNIS towers. Both of them have been already well hit, but one of the twins is on fire now. Somewhere from the 8th floor and above to the roof. It hurts me, I am hiding it aware of the fact that its just a drop in the ocean of the suffering the whole Bosnia and Herzegovina has been going through. I was watching it with sadness, and remembered all the moments of its construction and my pride of them, and this night its burning like a huge torch”, was written in his diary on the 8th june 1992.
Ivan Strauss died on the 25.08.2018, aged 90.