In Memoriam Jan Westra
Indescribably many people learned indescribably much from Jan Westra. With his passing, our Department loses someone who was invaluable, both administratively and professionally. He was an affable administrator. Although he did describe that role himself as 鈥渨alking annoyingly through the picture,鈥� he did so purposefully and in the best interests of faculty, colleagues and students. He sought reason and the collective, never conflict, and as dean also guided the Faculty through complex times.
Jan helped shape and sharpen Bouwkunde as a concept, especially in education. He was a distinguished link in the series of professors who shaped the program into what it is today. His contributions often had poetic connotations. He visualized the department as a dance floor and inspired lightheartedness. He introduced the term Archineering as a contamination of Architecture and Engineering. It pinpoints his position and view of the discipline, as he expressed it in his personal definition of architecture: 'beyond the necessary without becoming superfluous.'
Jan had a relentless fascination with building puzzles. It must have been part of the reason for his passionate interest in prefabrication, the palette of which he en passant expanded with a design of his own (the STEW house). It was the seductive combination of logic and playfulness that he found irresistible. He was the grandmaster of innovative detail. He executed the windows in a residence he designed as portholes and managed to realize them sublimely with cheap Plexiglas salad bowls he found at HEMA. Jan was not only a gifted architect, artist, teacher and dean, but above all loved in all levels of the faculty because of his modesty, his purity and his sincere interest, whether for a student or a colleague. Many a person will have a memory of a personal word or gesture from Jan, which regularly included Marlene's warm involvement. Jan was never just professor, dean or architect, he was also always inextricably visible as a husband, as a father, as a friend, as a human being.
We will continue to remember Jan in his mottos, 鈥渘ever cease to wonder鈥� and 鈥渓etting go provides grip鈥�.
Jan Westra started his career at 果冻传媒 in 1973. He became full professor Architectural Design and Engineering at the Department of the Built Environment in 1996, and was Dean of the department from 2002 until his retirement in 2011. A message of solace to the family can be written in the online condolence registry:
Petrie Daams / Silvie van Dam / Jan Schevers / Maarten Willems