Construction Kit Karlsruhe

On the occasion of the bicentenary of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and its predecessor institutions, the KIT Faculty of Architecture is highlighting the design interactions between its own institution and the city of Karlsruhe in the exhibition "Baukasten Karlsruhe."

The polytechnical school, founded on October 7, 1825, stood in an ambivalent tradition: the emancipatory spirit of the French Revolution – which had previously inspired the École Polytechnique in Paris and served as a model for Karlsruhe – combined with enlightened absolutism, which had reached an architectural zenith in the Baden royal city. The following two hundred years of the development of a "polytechnical architecture" were to be the centuries of growth and differentiation of the former baroque fan-shaped city, which gradually evolved into an organized but ultimately formally fragmented collection of artifacts. This increasing complexity did not occur without a simultaneous gain in a new, identity-forming creative power of architecture within the framework of an increasingly open society (despite all its disruptions and setbacks). Two-thirds of the development of present-day Karlsruhe has been shaped by the conditions and ideals of the Polytechnic, including its architecture.

The exhibition addresses its own Polytechnic tradition by highlighting the central importance of architectural building blocks for the evolving city. It does so by examining twelve particularly striking buildings that were constructed over the past 200 years with significant involvement from members of the Faculty of Architecture. These objects are examined for their operational, syntactical, and semantic interactions with the city: operational in the sense of the social practices of using and producing such artifacts; syntactically, primarily in the sense of the external form of the urban space and infrastructure networks; and semantically, primarily in terms of the symbolic charge of the artifacts and the network of meanings spanning the urban space.

The exhibition will feature drawings, models, photographs, and films that were developed and generated over the past four semesters as part of seminars and designs at the KIT Department of Architecture. A 200-page catalog will be published for the exhibition.

Opening: 5 November 2025, 7 p.m.