Promotion Award 2023 of the Foundation of German Architects
Congratulations on receiving the 2023 Promotion Award of the Foundation of German Architects! Katja Gadziak and Eva Krings were awarded for their master's thesis entitled "Without End Beginning - On the Transformation of the Row Housing Estate in Eisenhüttenstadt".
Eisenhüttenstadt was founded about 70 years ago as "Germany's first socialist city" and was a prestige project as well as an important industrial site of the GDR. Today, the city is characterized by vacancy and a lack of perspective - the population has declined from 53,000 inhabitants to 25,000 today.
What does the future of the city look like?
Due to the dramatic change, Eisenhüttenstadt had to reinvent itself again and again in the past. The work builds on this and makes use of the special history of the city, in which each residential complex embodies the respective zeitgeist of urban development and architecture. This driving force and uniqueness is highlighted in the work and translated into a spatial strategy. Local resources offer the potential to understand the crisis as an opportunity - because only in this way Without End Beginning succeeds.