Athene Awards 2024 for Tropical Architecture

TU Darmstadt Honors Outstanding Best-Practice Models

2024/11/24

On Wednesday (20th), the “Athene Awards for Excellent Teaching” were presented at TU Darmstadt. Since 2010, the Carlo and Karin Giersch Foundation has been honoring individuals, groups, or organizational units that have introduced exemplary and outstanding formats into academic teaching. The awards are endowed with a total of 46,000 euros. The award ceremony takes place following the annually held “Day of Teaching.”

Dr. Frederike Lausch (mi.) und Adrian Franco (2.v.li.) erhielten den Hauptpreis für die Aufarbeitung der globalen TU-Geschichte aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive mit der „Forschungswerkstatt zur Geschichte des Instituts für Tropisches Bauen in Darmstadt (1960er–1990er Jahre)“.

Picture: Klaus Mai

The main prize, worth 5,000 euros, was awarded this year to an interdisciplinary team: Adrian Franco, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Social and Historical Sciences, and Dr. Frederike Lausch, a former postdoc at the Department of Architecture, pursued a piece of TU Darmstadt history in their “Research Workshop on the History of the Institute for Tropical Architecture in Darmstadt (1960s–1990s).” They explored the history and work of the Institute for Tropical Architecture, later known as the Department of Planning and Building in Developing Countries.