“Big Beautiful Buildings” Award
Evangelisches Krankenhaus Hattingen
The Protestant Hospital Hattingen is now one of the “Big Beautiful Buildings.” The award from the StadtBauKultur NRW State Initiative was presented on September 27, 2018 as part of a small celebration at the hospital. The chair of the Augusta Foundation Ulrich Froese and BDA/AKG Architect Peter M. H. Damm from RDS Partner accepted the award from Professor Tim Rienitz, the former managing director of StadtBauKultur NRW. The reason for the award is a more than 50-year-old example of innovative hospital architecture, created from 1963 to 1967. Back then, Wolfgang Rauh, one of the founders of RDS Partner and the AKG Architects for Hospital Construction and Healthcare, developed the opposite bed position for the two-bed deep patient room. “When the future was built” was the title of the campaign by StadtBauKultur NRW and TU Dortmund on post-war architecture in the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018. This year, selected buildings in the Ruhr area will be honored, which reflect the joy of experimentation in particular and the spirit of innovation in culture, society, economy, and technology. The focus is on discovering and experiencing the architecture of the 1950s to 1970s in the Ruhr area. Since April, selected buildings from Germany’s Economic Miracle in the Ruhr area have been given clearly visible awards to attract attention to the buildings as “Big Beautiful Buildings” and to deliberately ask what makes them “big” and “beautiful.” The Evangelisches Krankenhaus Hattingen was the first and only hospital to be recognized.
