Anniversary

In 2023, the Faculty of Architecture - Urban Planning - Landscape Planning at the University of Kassel celebrated its 50th anniversary.

In 1973, the new Gesamthochschule Kassel (comprehensive unversity) initiated the reform courses of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Planning. With its reform courses, the "Kassel Model" called pedagogical concepts, institutional structures and subject content into question. The comprehensive university pursued a strong socio-political agenda and rethought the relationship between science, planning and society. Kassel made a name for itself in the German higher education landscape as a radical educational experiment, which in the years that followed gave rise to numerous professional innovations that had a lasting influence on the design and planning disciplines. Many topics were anticipated that have taken on a new urgency today in the face of unequal development and climate catastrophe. At the same time, the increased number of students, their diversity, the economisation of the education system with limited budgets and digitalisation require new ways of relating in university teaching and in joint learning and research.

The faculty took the anniversary as an opportunity to look back on its own history with a series of critical research exhibitions and to ask itself what relevance the experiments of that time have for us today. Until the summer semester of 2024, key aspects of the faculty's history and profile will be presented in the three Institutes of Architecture, Urban Development and Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning.

At the big anniversary celebration on 31 May 2023, the faculty hosted "Hot Chairs" with researchers and lecturers, talks with alumni and guests, lectures and a party.