The south campus of the Bauhaus University essentially consists of a large car park. It was built just a few years ago, along with a few new buildings and an underground car park. Several hundred square meters of green space were sealed in the process. The result is a dead area, asphalted right up to the edges of the building. The parking lot is now to become a usable and inviting place. It should be available to all members and visitors of the university, should offer space for experiments, test buildings and prototypes, for art and architecture, for sports and doing nothing. In addition to its practical use, the new campus must also become part of a strategy for a climate-neutral university.

In the 1970s, places of this kind sparked criticism of car-friendly cities, gluttony and environmental destruction. Traffic reduction, unsealing and greening have been part of the standard repertoire in architecture and urban planning since the 1980s. In 2002, almost twenty years ago, the federal government decided to reduce daily land use to thirty hectares by 2020. And in 2014, the Bauhaus University, which refers to a school that was far ahead of its time, built a storage area for more than a hundred cars that embodies everything that has been recognized as wrong and harmful for decades. A better object for a conversion is hard to find. Simply removing the parking spaces and the asphalt would only correct one grievance. The aim is to turn the parking lot into a «green research campus».

As users and active designers of the future urban culture, it is important to us that our campus is not only perceived as a world heritage site, but also as a beacon, as a model for sustainable further development and knowledge generation.

Participating persons:
Steffen de Rudder, Simon Steffen, Benjamin Schatz, Robert Mitzenheim

Related Links:

Campus Transformation