This year's main prize of 5,000 euros was awarded to an interdisciplinary team: Adrian Franco, a doctoral student in the Department of Social and Historical Sciences, and Dr Frederike Lausch, a postdoc in the Department of Architecture at the time, traced a piece of TU Darmstadt history in their ‘Research Workshop on the History of the Institute for Tropical Building in Darmstadt (1960s-1990s)’: the history and work of the Institute for Tropical Building, later the Department of Planning and Building in Developing Countries.

Lausch and Franco went far back in time with their students: in 1970, a group of architecture students from Darmstadt travelled by car to Accra, the capital of the Republic of Ghana, to document climate-adapted building techniques on site. At the same time, an ‘Institute for Tropical Building’ was taking shape in the Department of Architecture. Until the 1990s, students there worked on building projects in the so-called Global South. The institute and later the specialisation ‘Planning and Building in Developing Countries’ attracted international students, and a global network of researchers and institutions was established. The extensive materials that remained in the TU's libraries and archives inspired Franco and Lausch to develop their teaching format.

The seminar in the winter semester 2023/24 explored the historical view of ‘developing countries’ and forms of knowledge transfer in teaching and research. The aim was to open up the surviving sources and analyse them critically. Lausch, Franco and the students made the results available to the public in an elaborately designed and richly illustrated blog – a digital exhibition, so to speak. From today's perspective, the view of education, knowledge and the construction situation in developing countries at the time, as documented in the academic sources, sometimes appears patronising. Tangible market economy interests and West German economic, development and foreign policy also played a role in research and teaching.

The course thus contributed to the reappraisal of global TU history from an interdisciplinary perspective. The seminar was nominated for the Athena Prize by a student participant: ‘The organisation of guest lectures with different backgrounds and the associated discussion on topics of diversity and racism in teaching and architecture, both in retrospect of the archived materials available to the seminar and with a view to today's teaching and architecture, was particularly enriching,’ it says in its explanatory statement.

The department prizes are endowed with 2000 euros each. Our department was honoured:

Dr.-Ing. Kaja Beer for exceptional commitment, especially in times of particular challenges such as the corona pandemic and the energy crisis.

See all the award winners and read about the special prizes on the TU website:

https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/aktuelles_meldungen/einzelansicht_482816.de.jsp