At the beginning of the University of Karlsruhe stood a civil engineer: Johann Gottfried Tulla. He founded his engineering school in 1807 to train employees for the Baden road and hydraulic engineering administration he had ordered. An architect joined this project: Friedrich Weinbrenner. His building school had emerged from the Architectural Drawing School, which had existed since 1786. By uniting Tulla's engineering school and Weinbrenner's building school with the Freiburg teaching institute for mechanical engineering and a forestry school, the "Polytechnische Schule" was founded on October 7, 1825. It received university character and in 1885 the designation "Technische Hochschule". Tulla, colonel and chief director of the water and road administration of the Grand Duchy of Baden, had prepared the enterprise from long hand. In Paris, soon after Napoleon's coup d'état, he had got to know the Ecole Polytechnique, an institution of higher education that was first intended 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, basic research and application-oriented scientific work have traditionally come equally into their own. And even today, research is still being carried out in Tulla's special field, the regulation of the Rhine. Since 2002, the Geo and Environmental Sciences work together with Civil Cngineering in this Department. The interlocking and interaction of structures with their surroundings and the study of interventions in urban and cultural landscapes are hereby taken into account during education and in research.