Faculty of Civil Engineering, Geo- and Environmental Sciences

At the beginning of the University of Karlsruhe there was a civil engineer: Johann Gottfried Tulla. In 1807 he founded his engineering school to train employees for the Baden road and hydraulic engineering administration, which he ordered. There was also an architect: Friedrich Weinbrenner, his building school had emerged from the architectural drawing school that had existed since 1786. The "Polytechnic School" was founded on October 7th, 1825 through the merging of Tulla's engineering and Weinbrenner's construction school with the Freiburg mechanical engineering institute and a forestry school. It was given the character of a university and in 1885 the name "Technical University". Tulla, Colonel and Chief Director of the Water and Road Administration of the Grand Duchy of Baden, had prepared the company well in advance. In Paris, soon after Napoleon's coup d'état, he got to know the Ecole Polytechnique, a university that was supposed to teach scientific fundamentals before the prospective engineers specialized in their future profession.

Today, at the Fridericiana, as the university has been called since 1902, both basic research and application-oriented scientific work are justified by tradition. And even today research is being carried out on Tulla's specialty, the regulation of the Rhine. The Geosciences and Environmental Sciences departments have been working together with civil engineering in this faculty since 2002. The dovetailing and interaction of buildings with their surroundings and the study of interventions in urban and cultural landscapes are thus taken into account during training and research.