Prof. Andreas Kipar has received the Halstenberg Prize 2024

The Halstenberg Medal was presented to Andreas Kipar during a ceremony held in the Garden Hall of the Baukunstarchiv NRW in Dortmund. The President of the NRW Chamber of Architects, Ing. Ernst Uhing, opened the event. The Building Councillor Martin Harter, Councillor for Planning and Construction of the City of Essen and President of the DASL NRW regional group, welcomed around 200 guests, including Prof. Christoph Zöpel and the artist Thomas Schönauer.

 

 

In the subsequent speech “Projects: Landscape is Life”, Jens Hoffmann, Chief Operation Officer (COO) of LAND, presented Andreas Kipar’s career. Jens Hoffmann particularly honored Andreas Kipar’s role as a “thought leader and mediator in the field of landscape planning and structural change, which becomes clearer if we consider his exceptional role as an IBA correspondent, which allowed him – collaborating with Prof. Karl Ganser from 1989 to the late 1990s – to connect his experiences in Italy with those of the IBA Emscher International Building Exhibition.”

This special vocation was also emphasized in the laudatory speech for the awardee, given by Dipl.-Ing. Hans-Jürgen Best, retired head of the planning department and director of the city of Essen: “In the awareness of his mission to connect people with nature, he is an indispensable and tireless communicator. We sincerely thank him for this. At the same time, we also thank him for his lectures at many events, which are always an explosion of ideas, leading to reflection and forcing us to new beginnings and changes in many areas of life.”

 

 

In his acceptance speech, Andreas Kipar explained what continues to motivate him: “That curiosity for the unexpected, that feeling of what might happen behind the scenes. This passionate search in sharing experiences, thinking with people in projects, recognizing problems as opportunities, and pragmatically building bridges. These are still important stimuli in my daily thinking and work.”

Andreas Kipar used a quote from Friedrich Halstenberg himself – “It is the irrational of rationalists to want to be rational in an irrational world” – suggested by Christoph Zöpel, who was present, to introduce his hopes for the future: “This freedom of thought and action, that non-linear thinking that my friend and artist Thomas Schönauer, who is here with me, wrote in his book, is what I wish for all of us, on a large and small scale, here locally in the Ruhr region but also wherever we are called to act, in a free democratic exchange against all anti-democratic and populist temptations that are particularly visible at this moment.”

A great challenge for all of us, but “we have the unique opportunity to reorient ourselves in this time of transition, to take responsibility, and finally to position ourselves.” A path we can only walk together, as Andreas Kipar concluded his speech with Hölderlin’s quote: “going out into the open” and reconnecting with nature.

The final words were spoken by Dipl. Ing. Martin Bauer, Managing Director of the NRW regional group of DASL and shareholder of Planquadrat Dortmund, who invited the guests to an aperitif with musical accompaniment by saxophonist Wim Wollner.

With the annual award of the Halstenberg Prize by DASL NRW, the extensive work of Friedrich Halstenberg (1920-2010) in the field of science and politics, spatial planning, and urbanism, especially between the 1960s and 1980s, is publicly honored. It is the only prize in Germany in the field of spatial planning.

Andreas Kipar thus joins a group of illustrious winners such as architect and urban planner Peter Zlonicky (2021), the regional director of the Ruhr (Regionalverband Ruhr) Karola Geiß-Netthöfel (2022), and the urban planning couple Friedrich Wolters and Leonore Wolters-Krebs (2023).