Faculty blocks with joined library unit

The construction of the new Juridicum was the starting point for renewing the entire faculty block complex on Leibnizstraße. This new, five-storey building completely reshapes the entrance to the campus area. Inside, the cheerful and friendly atmosphere is filled with light colours and materials. Two multi-storey cascading staircases separate the public areas, create interesting views in and through the building and make it easier to find your way around this huge construction with almost 7,500 square metres of usable space. The Juridicum will be handed over to Kiel University in spring 2020 and then the Faculty of Law will move in.

The building does not only contain offices and seminar rooms. Almost all the specialised departmental libraries for law will also be housed here. These will be linked to the new library association in the lower levels of the faculty blocks. For this purpose, in the second phase of the renovation, a 20-metre wide connecting bridge will be built between the new Juridicum and the first faculty block at Leibnizstraße 4. The new space created by this bridge will hold attractive and modern library workstations for the Department of Philosophy.

The bridge is also the connecting point for the next phase in expanding the library association, which is associated with technical innovations for student learning: in addition to comprehensive WiFi coverage and a digital locking system, RFID technology will be introduced to enable contemporary methods of working with book inventories for the first time - including borrowing from the specialised departmental libraries.

The third phase will finally begin in the autumn of 2020: the actual renovation of the old faculty blocks. To start with, the institutions in Leibnizstraße 6 will move out of the building so that it can be renovated by 2022. Law institutes will then move into the new Juridicum. The Department of Philosophy offices will move into Leibnizstraße 4 on a temporary basis. After this, the plan is to renovate the other faculty blocks one after another, each in a two-year cycle. The order in which further renovation takes place will be specified in detailed plans to follow.

The overall renovation will cover all four faculty blocks, with around 3.7 hectares of usable space. It is the first renovation project ever of such a scale in Schleswig-Holstein’s university construction. And it requires solid planning. This is why a planning office, most likely agn leusmann from Hamburg, will be commissioned with the detailed planning as from December 2019.

The process of selecting an architect demanded answers to office workplace performance, the building sustainability and planning fees. It also required statements about the planning strategy, how mistakes will be handled in the project, the people involved and a sample of the work. The spectrum of services offered was therefore extremely broad, and needed to be assessed in a total of three selection stages. AGN Leusmann’s idea of a “landscape” was very convincing: different levels, interesting, open perspectives but which also offer protected alcoves, as well as their approach of transforming existing structures into transparent teaching, learning and working environments. The architects intensively dealt with the compendium of workshop series held in the past year (2018) and hosted by Wulf Dau-Schmidt, in which the ideas and expectations from university institutes, students and the CAU’s Facility Management were complied. These had a significant influence on which architect’s office was selected. In addition, the renovation project will also fulfil the state’s climate objectives as well as the CAU’s content-related targets in terms of digital working and learning.