From farms to the 'New Frontier'
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has awarded its 2023/24 Doctoral Prize. The prize, worth a total of €5,050, recognizes outstanding doctoral theses and underscores the importance of young scientists at KIT. The award ceremony took place on July 28, 2025, at the KIT Presidium.
One of the three awards this year goes to Dr. phil. Sina Brückner-Amin for her dissertation entitled “From farms to the ‘New Frontier’: The Planning of UC Irvine's Educational Environment, 1932–1965.” Using multimedia paper trails from institutional archives, the dissertation reconstructs and analyzes the approximately thirty-year planning history of a university campus in the Southern California desert. Conceived and implemented as an educational experiment by bureaucrats, the work tells of the attempt to shape a new generation of educational pioneers in and through the built environment. The work focuses on four spheres of planning that extend far beyond the scope of built architecture: a newly created planning bureaucracy, its controversial search for land, the cybernetic systematization of a campus network, and the self-representation of the new institution in visual media. In doing so, the work contrasts and complicates the dominant narratives of “progressive” or “alternative” architectural production in 1960s California.
This is the first time that the doctoral prize has been awarded to a Dr. phil. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister (KIT) and Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser (Goethe University Frankfurt) and funded as part of the LOEWE research focus “Architectures of Order” (2020–2023).
The prize was once again donated by the Schleicher Foundation in cooperation with the KIT Foundation. KIT would like to express its sincere thanks to both foundations for their commitment. In addition, this year's prize was increased by condolence donations in favor of young scientists – in memory of Prof. Dr. Robert Stieglitz (†), who was strongly committed to young researchers throughout his life.
In addition to Dr. Brückner-Amin, two other excellent dissertations were also honored:
• Dr.-Ing. Marvin Carl May – “Intelligent production control for time-constrained complex job shops”
• Dr.-Ing. Jiaming Zhang – “Scene Understanding for Intelligent Transportation and Mobility Assistance Systems”