Martin Holub

Martin Holub is a Czech-American architect.

Early life

Martin Holub was born in 1938 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to his father Jan (a lawyer) and mother Miloslava (a lawyer and art historian). In 1948 his father was banned from the field of law after the 1948 Communist coup, and became a cement factory worker. Later, his mother was sent to a Communist prison for eighteen months between 1950 and 1951. Later Jan went on to become a librarian at the Architectural Institute in Prague. After high school, Martin Holub studied architecture and graduated from the Czech Technical University in Prague with a master's degree and then from Academy of Fine Arts in Prague^[1][1] with a post-graduate degree.^[2]

Career

Holub began his career working in an architectural office of a state-owned building contractor. He was repeatedly offered work in Western Europe, but could not obtain an exit visa. Then in 1967 he was able to go to the UK in order to take up a job with the Department of Architecture of the Greater London Council. He had plans to return home, however within a year Warsaw Pact troops entered Prague and he decided to stay in the West. In 1970 he then took a job with an architecture firm in New York City,^[1] and opened the Martin Holub Architects and Planners the following year in 1971.^[3] In addition to his US buildings, he designed buildings in foreign countries, including apartment complexes in pre-Revolutionary Tehran, Iran.^[4]

During the late 1990s, Holub began designing residential buildings composed of complex shifting volumes, and so-called “slicing the box”. Many of these kinds of residential buildings were built in Dutchess County, New York,^[5][6] In addition to new interiors on the campus of Fordham University,^[7] Holub designed a number of commercial interiors in Manhattan. In 2008, he was also the architect of the Bohemian National Hall renovation in New York City, the largest foreign investment ever made by the Czech Republic.^[8] Many Holub’s buildings received design awards, including Rokeby apartments in Nashville, Tennessee and Dominican Chapel in Sparkill, New York.^[9]

Personal life

Holub was married from 1963 to 1973 to Eva Magdalena Jiricna, whom he lived with in Czechoslovakia and London, UK.^[10] He later married Karen Klier Kidder in 1992. Karen died of lung cancer in 2010 and in 2015 Holub married Sandra Raye Sanders.^[2]

References