Mensa auf dem Campus Deutz

A five-storey terraced building defines the campus square and extends the central green space to the west as a vertical garden. The footprint of the new building is returned to the campus as a communal space for students and staff, as well as an area for ‘urban gardening’. Fruit and vegetables thrive in the rooftop greenhouse and on the terraces; these can be processed in the kitchen within a manageable framework and subsequently consumed in the canteen. Students on the Deutz campus can thus experience the journey from fruit and vegetable cultivation to the finished meal.
The canteen is being constructed as a timber-concrete composite structure with a façade made from reused precast concrete elements. The process of dismantling, processing and reassembling existing components on site from the still-standing iconic IWZ building – deliberately staged on the campus of the technical university – Clientserves as an exemplary demonstration of how to manage increasingly scarce resources. At the same time, this process alludes to the disappearance of the striking cross-shaped building and thus connects with the genius loci in its own unique way.