Hans Strauch
Founder, president and creative director, HDS Architecture
Industry experience: 44 years
Hans Strauch’s family successfully sought restitution of their Berlin property seized by the Nazi government in 1933 and destroyed by an Allied air raid during the final days of World War II. For the first building in the redevelopment of the Potsdammer/Leipziger Platz following the fall of the Berlin Wall, they selected Cambridge architect Strauch to design the new Mosse Palais building that was completed in 1998 and leased to the American Jewish Committee. During his career, Strauch has worked alongside notable modernist architects including Benjamin Thompson at the Cambridge-based Architects Collaborative, influencing the design of his first building, Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. Today, Strauch’s HDS Architecture is leaving its mark on the built environment in Massachusetts, with an emphasis on multifamily projects including the recently-completed 525 Linc development in Allston.
Q: What were the circumstances leading to your design of the new Mosse Palais in Berlin?
A: Both of my parents fled Nazi Germany. On my father’s side, his stepfather was publisher of Berliner Tageblatt, the New York Times of its day. It was a Jewish-owned newspaper and anti-[Adolf] Hitler, so to say the least, when Hitler came to power the family had to leave quickly, to put it mildly. Everything was left behind, and the whole publishing empire was handed over. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, my uncle immediately started the process of restitution for properties that had been confiscated by the Nazis. Several of those were immediately sold to developers, and this particular one, I became involved as the architect in partnership with a developer who bought the property. It was completed in 1988 and they put the American Jewish Committee in for 10 years rent-free.
Q: What were your goals for how the design could reflect the history of the property?
A: It was a commercial project with a combination of office space and residential on the upper floors. Local zoning required that 20 percent of every project be residential, whether you are building a single building or a huge project. The building that was bombed and ruined was a smaller building, an in-town residence of my step-great-grandfather and step-grandfather. It was a very stately building with a very specific design and I related the new building as it evolved out of the ground in some similar ways to the older building. Rather than doing a modernist intervention building which only called attention to itself, I decided to do something that at least to me had greater meaning in that it had some relationship to its history and the family that had a major impact on society. This was not by any means a slick, modern building. I wanted to respect the past and build for the present.
Q: How did your initial stints at The Architects Collaborative and Benjamin Thompson and Assoc. shape your career?
A: I worked at The Architects Collaborative when I was in college during spring breaks and summers, and eventually worked there [full-time] for a couple of years. They had a specific approach with precast concrete, which I adopted into my very first building which I designed in Philadelphia, Temple University Hospital. After two years, I literally jumped across the street and worked with Benjamin Thompson and Assoc. Ben Thompson was a unique and very difficult person to communicate with, but he was a unique individual with an incredible vision. I worked with him on projects in the U.S. and Ireland, in particular a large project in Dublin. What I loved about working with Ben was we really focused on the materials and the elements we brought to the place and activating the urban edge of the buildings. It was less about the strict international style form, and more about place and functionality.
Q: What was your goal for differentiating HDS as a firm at its founding in 1989?
A: In 1989, I decided the time had come and I had enough experience under my belt. At the time, the buzz was waterfront economic development. So, I started my company by calling every economic development director from Bangor, Maine down the entire East Coast, around the panhandle and ending in Mobile, Alabama. I’d get on a plane and go, and I did that 20 or more times. That was 35 years ago.
I developed relationships and that’s key to my way of working. It’s not just about the end project, it’s about the team and the people. I helped bring projects to life in Savannah, Florida, Alabama and I still have close friends in Mobile, where we’re doing an office building of all things today.
I have three rules when I enter a project. Do we have a great team? Do I like working with this team? And are we going to design something terrific? I play tennis competitively, so that’s important to me. Every project has its own specific criteria. If we’re going to do a Chapter 40B residential project, you’ve got to make the economics work perfectly to come out of the ground. You’re somewhat restricted in what you can do. Another project we’re working on is a high building in Cambridge, where there’s another expectation.
Q: What was the strategy for designing a waterfront multifamily project such as Breakwater Lynn to anticipate sea level rise?
A: It was recently nominated by the Environmental Business Council of New England for an award. The garage on the lower levels of the building, which is halfway below-grade, was one area in which it was designed such that if water were to come in, it could travel through the whole garage and get out. You don’t create a situation where the building will float off the ground like a boat.
Strauch’s Five Favorite ‘God on Earth’ Places:
- Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright
- Brooklyn Bridge by John Roebling
- Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier
- The Golden Gate Bridge, his mother’s entry to the U.S. after fleeing Nazi Germany
- His wife’s kitchen
