The awarding of the honorary membership took place during a ceremony on 11 October 1999 in the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna. The laudatory speech was held by former rector emeritus Prof. Dr. Friedrich Moser, Emeritus Institute for Local Spatial Planning of the Vienna University of Technology.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna for their hospitality.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
It is with great pleasure that I have taken on the task of introducing Professor Antero MARKELIN, who is here and now to be awarded honorary membership of the Institute for Spatial Interaction and Simulation.
Prof. Markelin is a prominent, internationally known and recognised representative of the field of urban planning-urban design.
He was born in Helsinki in 1931 and studied architecture at the Technical Universities in Munich and Helsinki. After completing his studies, he founded his own architectural practice in 1961, which he subsequently ran with his wife Ulla Lehtonen.
After a three-year period as assistant professor at the Helsinki University of Technology, he was appointed full professor of urban planning and housing development at the Stuttgart University of Technology in 1966. After thirty years of teaching and research, he retired in 1996.
Professor Markelin was one of the first representatives of the field of urban planning to deal with problems of visualisation using the most modern methods. The computer-controlled visualisation laboratory he created at the Technical University of Stuttgart was known not only in professional circles but also to a broad public.
The changes of urban sensitive spaces, through selective interventions of architectural objects, could be visualised as close to reality as possible in the model test. In our eyes, this was a significant gain in knowledge in the evaluation of urban changes before the realisation of construction measures.
The current state of development of electronic media today makes it possible to represent and animate a reality simulated by the computer independently of physical models.
Professor Markelin not only anticipated this development, but ultimately also played a decisive role in shaping it.
Antero Markelin is a member of the Finnish Architects’ Association and a long-standing member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning. He served for 14 years as an expert on the city of Stuttgart’s urban planning committee. He is an honorary member of the European Society for Endoscopy in Architecture, and among other things, co-founder and since 1994 chairman of the Alvar Aalto Society. He is the recipient of high awards and decorations from his country.
I am pleased to announce to you, Ladies and Gentlemen, the appointment of Univ.Prof. Antero Markelin as Honorary Member of the Institute for Spatial Interaction and Simulation (IRIS-ISIS). Thank you, Mr. Markelin, for your willingness to accept this award.
Our Honorary Member, Prof. Antero Markelin, passed away on 14 November 2005. On the occasion of the conferment of honorary membership in 1999, Prof. Friedrich Moser held the laudation, which has not lost any of its relevance.
We will keep Prof. Markelin in honourable memory.
