Interview with BTU Alumnus Prof. Dr.-Ing. John Grunewald (Civil Engineering)

Prof. Dr.-Ing. John Grunewald studied Civil Engineering at the predecessor institution of BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. From 1986 to 1987, he first completed his vocational baccalaureate at the University of Applied Sciences for Civil Engineering in Cottbus and then studied Civil Engineering with a specialization in construction informatics in Cottbus until 1991. Since then, he has worked in German and international institutions and is currently Head of the Institute for Building Climatology and Professor of Building Physics at the TU Dresden. To mark the 30th anniversary of his final degree, he and the alumni of his year visited the main campus in Cottbus, where much has changed and developed over the last 30 years. We took the opportunity for a very interesting conversation.

Hello Mr. Grunewald, what would you have said back then as a freshman if I had told you that you were going to get a professorship?
No, I probably wouldn't have believed it. I didn't think that far into the future back then. Even the prospect of successfully completing your studies is quite an acceptable scenario for a first-year student. I had actually toyed with the idea of studying Physics in Leipzig for a while at the beginning. However, I can remember that the longer I studied in Cottbus, the more certain I became that I had found my subject there. As I already had vocational training as a skilled construction worker, studying Civil Engineering was the obvious choice and, with a penchant for Physics, it eventually became Building Physics.

You chose to specialize in construction informatics in Cottbus, how can we imagine the computer science course back then? You've also said that you could only use the computer at night, what was that like?
That's a very good question. Sometimes I think that it was a special privilege to be able to work with Computer Science in those very early days. We experienced the development of personal computers, including operating systems and programming languages, at first hand. At that time, GDR computers ran a modified copy of the Microsoft operating system MS-DOS. Teaching construction informatics was more of a compulsory program. After all, Basic and Fortran were two programming languages on the curriculum. However, anyone who was anyone learned Turbo Pascal or C on their own. The corresponding books were quickly out of print and were often lent out or exchanged. As a student, having your own PC was out of the question. Around 1988, however, the first public computer cabinet was set up at the university. The MatNat faculty also had its own small non-public cabinet. Both cabinets were reserved for academic staff during the day. At the beginning, we had to sign up on a list to reserve seats for the night. A fellow student and I were then granted access to the MatNat cabinet during the day due to our special commitment as SHK in the Building Physics chair. A particular highlight was the use of a Unix workstation that had found its way to the GDR via Taiwan, bypassing the CoCom list, i.e. the export ban on high-tech goods to the Eastern Bloc. The operating system also included a C compiler, so the decision to learn the C programming language through self-study was absolutely right.

You experienced politically exciting times during your studies in Cottbus with German reunification, how did that shape you and how did it feel, especially with this background, when you later took up an associate professorship in New York?
A little anecdote to start with: I happened to witness the origins of the political change, the first demonstration in Leipzig on the eve of October 7, 1989. I was traveling through from Cottbus to Thuringia with a 4-hour stopover in Leipzig, because the GDR Reichsbahn apparently didn't attach much importance to precise connections. So I had enough time to explore the city center from the main station and also passed the Nikolaikirche. The unusually strong presence of armed forces in the city center was striking. Suddenly, a three-man marching band dressed in medieval costume appeared, which was quickly joined by other people, so that the procession grew to around 50 people within 10 minutes. This provoked the police to such an extent that it was deemed appropriate to intervene. I am convinced that this was the decisive mistake that set the ball rolling. Within minutes, almost everyone present on the square showed solidarity with the marching band and the police had increasing difficulty controlling the situation. Motivated by the arrest of individuals, a game of "cat and mouse" developed, with people chanting "We're staying here, we're staying here!", while the text was quickly changed to "We're drinking beer, we're drinking beer!" as the police approached. Finally, the armed forces drove up army trucks, grabbed a large number of people from the crowd (especially the long-haired youths in jeans), threw them onto the back of the trucks and then transported them away. These events had a particular impact on me. It was the first time in my life that I had experienced a demonstration in the GDR that was not organized "from above". I had the feeling that I had witnessed something historic, which soon turned out to be true. The increasing flare-up of demonstrations in various cities in the GDR, the refugees via Hungary and in the Prague embassy and finally the fall of the Wall: all unimaginable at that time.

I have often been asked in the USA how I see the fall of the Wall from an East German perspective. This incident illustrates the will for change that came directly from the population at the time. There was a spirit of optimism that only develops under very special circumstances. My cohort was probably one of the main winners of the reunification. What could be better than studying under good conditions, experiencing such exciting times and having all the opportunities open to you at the end of your studies?

Please tell us how you came to pursue an academic career and how the contacts and activities at the university in Cottbus supported you at the time?
Clearly, the origins go back to when I was studying at the Cottbus University of Applied Sciences for Civil Engineering, as the BTU was called before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GDR education system, which was very well organized, offered the opportunity to study according to a so-called special curriculum. Special commitment in certain subjects could be combined with the "deselection" of other subjects. This funded specialization in studies without introducing a modular system, as is the case today with the Bologna Process. My particular scientific interest in Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science and my work as an SHK in the Department of Building Physics led me to the conviction that this was "my direction" and the "deselection" of less interesting subjects reinforced my conviction. Ironically, I had to catch up on these subjects in the last semester because the German education system did not offer this option. During my periods of study, I had developed simulation software for building physics, which also became the subject of my diploma thesis. I was sure that I wanted to continue developing this project after graduation. At that time, a professor from the Federal Institute for Materials Research (BAM) in West Berlin visited us in Cottbus to recruit young scientists for BAM. That was the start of my scientific career. At BAM, I was given the freedom to continue working on the development of building physics simulation software, as coupled moisture and heat transport in building materials is a sub-field of Materials Research in the construction industry. The connection to Cottbus remained. Firstly, I still lived in Cottbus and secondly, the core team of building physics met every Saturday at the university to discuss the latest developments of the week. While I was working in Berlin, my former building physics lecturer from Cottbus, Prof. Häupl, was appointed to the Chair of Building Physics at TU Dresden. So it made sense for me to move to Dresden in 1994 and pursue doctoral studies there, which developed from the subject of my diploma and my work at BAM. I successfully completed my doctoral thesis in 1997. This laid the foundation for collaboration in international research projects, initially in the EU's 4th Framework Program with partners from Finland (University of Helsinki) and Belgium (KU Leuven). The acquisition of my own research projects was particularly important and indispensable for the continuation of my scientific career. In 2000, I was able to start a project for the development of special interior insulation systems for existing buildings with facades worthy of preservation in the EU's 5th Framework Program. This was followed in 2001 by collaboration in the DFG priority program for the simulation of the temporal behaviour of damage processes in building materials. These projects were milestones in my personal development. For the first time in my life, I had overall responsibility for an international scientific project as project coordinator. The result of the EU project was the development of the first interior insulation system in Germany, which led to the establishment of an interior insulation market in which an entire product range is represented today that is based on the basic physical concepts developed at the time.

What does your day-to-day work as Institute Director and Professor look like nowadays?
You have to accept the tasks that life presents at every stage. As an institute director and professor, you hardly do any research yourself anymore, but supervise doctoral candidates, help write project proposals, have lots of individual discussions and have plenty of emails to deal with. In order to be able to work seriously on the scientific topics set, you have to be able to build an interdisciplinary team and keep it together. Everyday life also involves a lot of bureaucracy. The continuous financing of staff is difficult because the current law on temporary academic contracts puts many hurdles in our way. Nevertheless, my everyday life is very interesting and varied, characterized by working with people from very different areas and cultures. We have already had Humboldt Fellows from Peru and Uzbekistan at the Institute, there was a project with Egyptian partners, a PhD summer school in Brazil, years of cooperation with the National Institute of Cultural Properties in Tokyo and much more. A particular highlight was the work on the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Today, the institute has its own software department with around 25 employees, which is continuing the development that I started during my studies at a professional level. We also have a building physics research and development laboratory integrated into the TU Dresden building laboratory center and an engineering department that takes on research services and orders from the field. The software developed at the Institute is thus continuously subjected to practical testing and the need for improvement is reflected back to the software developers. The institute's field of activity therefore ranges from basic research to practical applications. Typical projects include, for example, the development of regenerative heat supply concepts or the renovation of valuable historical buildings.