Campus

For almost two decades, the Rector’s offices of the University of Applied Sciences have worked to secure premises for the Detmold branch adequate to its mission in research and teaching. The long-term goal of securing a campus site moved closer to realisation after 1991-’92, when the British and German armies abandoned their former barracks area on Detmold’s Emilienstraße, and a report by the State Construction Office confirmed the suitability of the site for the accommodation of the college departments.
The first part of the area, with Blocks 1 and 3, was acquired from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1994, and the rest in 1999.
In the spring of 2003, the so-called “Bülow Block” was rebuilt for use by the Departments of Architecture and Interior Architecture, and has been available for use for research and teaching since the middle of 2004.

The new “Emilie Campus” was not yet complete, however: a new laboratory building for Department 3 (Civil engineering), with a central three-story building-materials laboratory, and an institute building for Department 1 (Architecture and Interior Architecture), in which central facilities for the entire campus, such as the library and the canteen, are also housed, had to be planned and implemented.

The somewhat unusual situation was that the same architecture experts were in effect wearing both hats: in their capacity as staff of the Building and Property Management (BLB), they are the “landlords”, while in their capacity as a college, they were the “tenants”. As a result of this conflict, the BLB issued a tender for a competition, in which both the BLB staff and the college teaching staff and students could participate; the latter were the largest group, with some sixty submissions.
The winning entry, a student submission, was implemented during the winter semester of 2007-’08, and students and the teaching and administrative staffs could move in.