CAMPUS Transfer - Exhibition
A selection of the CAMPUS Transfer Master's theses from the winter semester 2021/22 was exhibited on 04.04.2022 at the event "Land- und Ernährungswirtschaft im (Struktur-)Wandel" (Agriculture and Food Industry in Transformation) in Erklelenz, which was also attended by the NRW Minister of Agriculture Ursula Heinen-Esser. Professor Lohrberg opened the exhibition of theses at the beginning of the event, presented the idea and framework conditions of the "CAMPUS Transfer" project and guided visitors through the individual designs. The exhibition met with great interest - the student ideas for the competence center in Erkelenz's industrial area East were lively discussed and found fresh and inspiring.
Impulses for the agricultural and food industry in the Rhenish mining region
"Agriculture and food in (structural) change" was the title of a high-profile event held on April 4 in the Erkelenz Stadthalle. The event was hosted by the Zukunftsagentur Rheinisches Revier (ZRR) together with the Ministry for the Environment, Agriculture, Nature Conservation and Consumer Protection, the city of Erkelenz and the BioökonomieREVIER initiative. NRW Minister of Agriculture Ursula Heinen-Esser gave a welcoming speech and praised the CAMPUS Transfer project planned at the Erkelenz site as a "lighthouse project".
Translated excerpt from the press release of the city of Erkelenz.
CAMPUS Transfer:
Competence Center for Transfer of the Agriculture and Food Industry -
a Future Location for Agriculture and Food in the Rhenish Mining Area
With the phasing out of open-cast lignite mining, the Rhenish coalfield is facing a major structural change. If the focus in this context often falls on industry and trade, the structural change will also affect the agricultural and food industry in the area - which is linked to opencast mining in many ways and shapes large areas of the area. In this situation, various players from the agricultural and food industries, from environmental protection and nature conservation, from municipalities and associations have joined forces to create a future location for agriculture and food in the Rhenish mining area, a so-called CAMPUS Transfer Competence Center.
Applications for funding and talks with the city of Erkelenz, which is envisaged as the location, are currently underway. There are initial ideas about what the competence center should include - from conference rooms to offices for a business office to facilities for start-ups - but the planning is not yet far enough advanced for more concrete, located and visualized designs to be available.
Master's theses in the architecture program in the winter semester 2021/22
In this situation, the Chair of Landscape Architecture at RWTH Aachen University offered the CAMPUS Transfer association - as a potential client - to dedicate the master's theses in the RWTH's architecture course in the winter semester 2021/22 to the theme of the Competence Center. The cooperation was quickly agreed upon, as it offered a "win-win-win": The students could develop their work in a real environment, the CAMPUS Transfer association could gain more concrete ideas for the center, and for the city of Erkelenz it became possible to take a look at the future of the RIO industrial park.
The student design project "CAMPUS Transfer" was an experimental field for fresh ideas and an invitation to the students to deal intensively with a multi-layered space over the course of a semester, to reflect on its network of effects, to reinterpret it and to formulate individual design ideas for an impulse-giving location in the Rhenish Revier. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Lohrberg and the Chair of Landscape Architecture, together with the city of Erkelenz, developed an overarching project framework with supervision, but above all with stakeholder meetings and insight into current planning and discussions. Over a period of six months, the students were able to carry out their own site analyses, develop their ideas and concepts, set individual focal points and elaborate their designs with self-selected in-depth studies. The master theses were supervised at the chairs of Prof. Sabine Brück-Dürkop, Prof. Dr.-Ing Frank Lohrberg, Prof. Thomas Schmitz, Prof. Hartwig Schneider and Prof. Uwe Schröder.
Ten designs with different approaches were selected from the works and prepared for the exhibition on 04.04. in Erkelenz. The works will be exhibited there again at a further event on 30.05.2022.