Gaspar Kani

After studying at the Technical Faculty of the University of Zagreb, Kani worked for a short time in the design office of the Königshütte Steelworks in Silesia, but very quickly obtained a post as assistant to the chair of structural theory, strength of materials and materials testing at the University of Zagreb. It was at this university that he became a lecturer for structural theory in 1942 and one year later be- came assistant to Otto Graf, thereafter Richard Deininger, at Stuttgart TH. After the war, he worked for four years as a building contractor. It was during these years that he developed the iteration method of calculating systems with a high degree of static indeterminacy – a method which was later to bear his name. He gained his doctorate at Stuttgart TH in 1951 and afterwards worked primarily on prestressed concrete structures, initially as an industrial engineer and later as a consulting civil engineer. In 1960 he was offered a post at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he researched the causes of shear failures in reinforced concrete beams. At its conference in April 1969, the American Concrete Institute (ACI) awarded him posthumously the Wason Medal for the most important ACI Journal paper of the year 1967.

Main contributions to structural analysis:

Die Berechnung mehrstöckiger Rahmen [1949]; Spannbeton in Entwurf und Ausführung [1955] 

Source: Kurrer, Karl-Eugen The History of the Theory of Structures, Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn Verlag für Architektur und technische Wissenschaften GmbH, Berlin (Deutschland), ISBN 3-433-01838-3, 2008; p. 740