Hubert Rusch, the senior author of this volume, who died in 1979, was one of the great international figures in the field of reinforced concrete. He combined outstanding professional achievements in design, research and teaching with a warm outgoing personality. Aided by his knowledge of five languages, this combination made him a most effective leader in international organizations and led to many personal-professional friendships in a variety of countries.As a practicing engineer, both in Germany and in Argentina, he was responsible for the design and, often, construction of exceptional concrete structures such as large shell roofs, domes, aircraft hangars, industrial plants, harbor structures, and precast and prestressed concrete systems. His distinguished academic career began in 1948 when he accepted a professorship in concrete construction at his Alma Mater, the Technische Universitiit Munchen. In his additional related capacity as director of the Materials Testing Institute, which he greatly enlarged and modernized, he conducted and supervised research on a large scale. This resulted in important basic contributions in such areas as the structural performance of concrete, creep, shrinkage, crack formation, inelastic flexural theory, concrete quality control, limit design, and safety theory based on probabilistic reasoning, to mention only the most important ones.His far-reaching international impact was based not only on these engineering achievements, but also very much on his multilinguality and, particularly, on the ease and warmth with which he established and maintained close personal relationships. When the European Concrete Committee (CEB) began its work in 1953, he immediately became one of its leading members as a Founding Vice President, later its President, and finally its Honorary President. In these capacities, he helped guide the CEB in the creation of its internationally important Model Code, and also established close liaison between the CEB and the American Concrete Institute.Among his international connections, those with the United States were particularly close. For one year he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cornell v vi Dedication University, and later held a similar appointment at the University of Texas in Austin. At both institutions his interaction with colleagues and students was immediate, close, productive, and often long lasting.His multifarious activities and his 130 publications, including books translated into several languages, brought him many honors and distinctions in Germany and elsewhere. Of these, only those bestowed on him in the United States will be mentioned here: He was elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Member of the American Concrete Institute, which also conferred on him its Wason Medal and Alfred Lindau Award, and he received the Longstreth Medal of the Benjamin Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.This great man enjoyed life in many of its aspects, in his closeness to his family, in his love for nature, music...
