The Karl Foerster Foundation for Applied Vegetation Science is once again promoting young talent. Students and graduates have until May 15 to submit their work for the Ulmer Prize 2023. Read all about the award here.

The Karl Foerster Foundation for Applied Vegetation Science is once again promoting young talent. Students and graduates have until May 15 to submit their work for the Ulmer Prize 2023. Read all about the award here.

Bachelor’s and Master’s theses can be submitted for this year’s Ulmer Prize until May 15, 2023. One focus of the Karl Foerster Foundation for Applied Vegetation Science is the promotion of young talent. For this reason, the international Ulmer Prize has been awarded every two years since 2007. The award is intended to highlight awareness of the use of plants in garden and landscape architecture. The Ulmer Prize honors the concrete use of plants as a design tool. Outstanding graduates and students of landscape architecture and planning are thus to be motivated to actively engage with plants as a means of construction.

The Ulmer Prize honors significant work by graduates and students from the relevant universities and universities of applied sciences. Both theoretical-conceptual works and concrete planning designs can be submitted. Proposed planting concepts must be convincing in terms of design. They should also have a lasting effect.

Professors of landscape architecture and planning or related courses of study nominate students or graduates for the Ulmer Prize. They must substantiate their choice with a two- to three-page expert opinion. The proposed participants must be a maximum of thirty-five years old. The work must be written in German or English. They must also be no more than three years old. Normally, individuals are nominated. However, smaller groups are also permitted in justified exceptional cases. Theses (Bachelor’s/Master’s theses), coursework as well as doctoral theses and research papers can be submitted.

For the Ulmer Prize, the work must demonstrate an increase in the quality of the open space through the creative use of plants. On the one hand, the proposed design and spatial quality of the work is assessed. How the socio-cultural and historical references have been worked out is also important here. On the other hand, the functional and site suitability is relevant. The maintenance and development concept also plays a role here. In detail, the proposed species and variety combinations, the form and color concept, as well as the adjacencies must be convincing.

The work must be submitted to the Karl Foerster Foundation by May 15, 2023. The Ulmer Prize consists of a certificate and 4,000 euros. The publisher Eugen Ulmer donates the prize money. The jury consists of three members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The decision will be communicated to the nominating professor. The results will also be published in specialist publications and on the Internet.

The submission address for the Ulmer Prize is: The Board of Trustees of the Karl Foerster Foundation, c/o Prof. Dr. Norbert Kühn, TU Berlin, Königin-Luise-Straße 22, 14195 Berlin. You can also view the call for entries online here.

More about the winners of the Ulmer Prize 2021. The award went to Patrick Putzig and Sebastian Hobmeier. The two works impressed with their innovative approaches to the use of plants. In his master’s thesis, award winner Sebastian Hobmeier demonstrated the potential of the combined use of seeds and woody plants in urban spaces. He focused on “coppicing” as a care and design tool in the use of plants. In his master’s thesis, Patrick Putzig wrote about design strategies for the site-specific use of woody structures in the city, so-called “Treescapes”.

The classic “Collections in Safety” is still a standard work for practical museum operations. Although the third, expanded edition was published in 2002, it contains important additions for conservators that are still valid. When a book appears in its third edition, it must be pretty good or pretty important. In the case of “Sammlungsgut in Sicherheit”, both are true. Because […]

The classic “Collections in Safety“ is still a standard work for practical museum operations. Although the third, expanded edition was published in 2002, it contains important additions for conservators that are still valid.

When a book appears in its third edition, it must be pretty good or pretty important. In the case of “Sammlungsgut in Sicherheit”, both are true. This is because the book on the topics of lighting and light protection, air conditioning, prevention of harmful substances, pest control, security technology, fire protection and hazard management is a fundamental work for museum work. It contains knowledge and numerous tips for the organization of tasks in a museum.

The volume has been expanded to include chapters on the prevention of harmful substances and pest control. This expansion was particularly requested by conservators and restorers. The section on hazard management was created at the suggestion of security experts.

However, some chapters begin with overly basic information. At the beginning of her article “Fire protection in museums”, Barbara Fischer explains what a fire is: “A fire is a chemical process in which a flammable substance combines with oxygen (oxidation) and which takes place exothermically – i.e. with the release of heat – at a high reaction rate.”

This sounds a bit like elementary school science lessons and will underchallenge, if not annoy, any reader. And this is completely unnecessary, because Fischer’s article is good and important, as it not only describes the causes of fires and how to combat them, but also goes into detail about protection and the problems it can cause. These include, for example, emergency exits, which can save the lives of museum visitors in the event of a fire, but which can also be used by thieves. Here, Fischer brings together all the usual options for opening escape routes in an emergency, but making them more difficult for thieves to pass through.

The other articles are similarly structured: They list which technical options exist and thus provide decision-making aids and the basis for weighing up which systems a particular museum might need. All of this is illustrated with numerous tables, formulas and graphics, such as Wibke Unger’s very convincing article on pests in museums. Various insects are clearly illustrated and there are precise instructions on how to destroy them.

All the authors are well aware of one shortcoming of their contributions, as editor Gunter S. Hilbert writes in the foreword: “In the course of working on their manuscripts, the co-authors found themselves in the situation of the hare from the fable of the race with the hedgehog. Although always striving for topicality, by the end of the last chapter some novelty, some innovation, had already caught up with them.” One of the authors, Hans-Jürgen Harras, Head of the Security Department at the Berlin State Museums of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, explains that, in line with Hilbert’s guiding principles, the chapters were preceded by the basics and history of the respective topic. The results were described as a guideline for action and the way in which the knowledge was gained was also made clear.