Biography|Klaus Töpfer — The Kleist Villa Where He Founded IASS

After Nairobi, Töpfer did not retire into a memoir.

On 2 February 2009, in Potsdam, federal research minister Annette Schavan and Brandenburg's Johanna Wanka named him founding director of a new Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.

The founding assembly of the supporting association sat that Monday.

The institute was to occupy the former Bundesbank compound on Berliner Strasse — the listed Villa von Kleist at number 130, plus the bank annex behind it on Helmholtzstrasse.

Spiegel photographed him in front of the villa that summer and said up to fifty fellows would work there from the autumn, on a seven-year grant of nine million euros a year from Bund and Land.

Wikipedia and the institute's own later history date the founding to 2 February 2009 and his directorship to September 2015.

Carlo Rubbia and Mark Lawrence later joined as scientific directors.

The villa had been a private house, a DDR state-bank property, and then a Bundesbank branch and seminar house.

Brandenburg bought the site in 2009 so the new institute would not have to wait for a new building.

In January 2023 the IASS was folded into the Helmholtz Association as the Research Institute for Sustainability, still on this plot.

Töpfer's title there was founding executive director, not minister and not UN official.

The work was to put climate science in the same rooms as economics and governance.

The villa still stands on Berliner Strasse, a short walk from the New Garden.

A visitor sees a research campus that kept the old bank house rather than a memorial plaque to one director.

The date to mark is the Monday he was given the keys to build it.

Photo: Klaus Töpfer at IASS, Potsdam, 2017. Arno Mikkor / Estonian Presidency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.