History and reception of the Bauakademie in the GDR. Institutional History and Interview Project

The Bauakademie der DDR, founded on 25 January 1951, formed the heart of the East German construction industry for four decades. As a central institution, it brought together the GDR's most important research and development work in the fields of architecture, urban planning and the construction industry. Its aim was to promote the reconstruction and structural reorganisation of the GDR in accordance with the ideological and political guidelines of the state and to create the technical foundations for the construction industry.

In this respect, the Bauakademie developed a threefold fundamental effectiveness and significance: it conducted basic research for the construction industry in the GDR, acted on behalf of the state as a supervisory and control authority (especially for new construction areas or urban planning competitions) and was at the same time an exclusive professional learned society with the right to award doctorates. After its dissolution in 1991, it became a symbol for the history of science and research in the GDR, but has hardly been thoroughly analysed scientifically to this day. This project aims to bring it back into the focus of historiographical institutional and transformation research.

The research project ‘History and Reception of the Bauakademie der DDR’ aims to analyse the role and significance of this institution in connection with the building and urban development of the GDR as well as its post-history in the transformation period of the 1990s. Going beyond a narrow focus on the GDR, the interplay of the periods before, during and after 1989 will be analysed. The aim is to create a comprehensive picture of the Bauakademie, its work and its protagonists, which illuminates the significance of this institution and its research for the building industry in East Germany.

The project is being developed in cooperation with the Federal Foundation Bauakademie and the research focus ‘Contemporary History and Archive’ of the IRS Erkner. In this project, interviews with former employees of the Bauakademie are planned, which, in addition to the dominant Institute for Urban Design and Architecture (ISA), will explicitly cover the entire range of the 14 different institutes as well as the central work areas of the Bauakademie. The result is a multifaceted collection of voices and perspectives that contributes to the scientific reappraisal and historical anchoring of the knowledge and experiences of these actors. Excerpts from the interviews will be made available to the public on the websites of the two institutions supporting the project and in full in the IRS Scientific Collections Archive for research purposes. In addition, the current state of research and the archive situation on the history of the Bauakademie (primarily the Federal Archives and the Scientific Collections of the IRS) will be documented.

The interviews and documents obtained as part of this project will secure the knowledge of the people who once worked at the Bauakademie and make it accessible for posterity. With this start-up project, which is intended to result in a larger research project on the Bauakademie and the institutional system of the GDR building industry, the history of the Bauakademie of the GDR will be illuminated from the perspective of its actors, archived and made available for scientific and public reception - a contribution to the documentation and processing of the architectural and scientific development of East Germany in the 20th century.