Prof. Dr. h.c. Eduard Imhof zum 60. Geburtstag

Summary

This is a tribute on the sixtieth birthday of Eduard Imhof, with a selected list of his major works. Born on 25 January 1895 in Schiers, Imhof studied geodesy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and in 1925 succeeded his teacher Fridolin Becker (1854–1922) in the chair of topography and cartography there. The notice records his long presidencies of the Zurich Geographical-Ethnographical Society and the Association of Swiss Geographical Societies and his honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1949. The author identifies his main fields as relief shading with realistic oblique illumination (giving plains a half-tone), rock-face drawing, work on generalization, and the making of outstanding relief models; he favoured realistic light-and-shadow representation over a more impressionistic emphasis on object colours, and durably influenced the development of the "Swiss manner." The author credits him with cartography's renewed turn toward map graphics as the discipline's most important task, and, speaking as a colleague, wishes him many more productive years. The appended list covers single sheets, wall and school maps, a roughly 1:10,000 "wall-painting" map of the Walensee area, relief models, and a chronological bibliography from 1922 to 1953, including the Swiss secondary-school atlas and Gelände und Karte (1950).