Qualla: Ruhr University Bochum

Ruhr University Bochum: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simplicius, CC BY-SA 3.0. The architect Helmut Hentrich called it a 'harbor of knowledge.' Fourteen high-rise buildings, almost identical, placed across the ridge south of Bochum so that all their roofs hit the same height even though the hillside underneath ripples up and down. From the right angle, the buildings really do look like ships at anchor in a concrete dock, their funnels lined up against the Ruhr sky. The metaphor is romantic, the execution is brutalist, and the meaning is unmissable: in 1965, on a former coal field, West Germany opened its first new public university since the war, and built it as the largest single thing the postwar republic had attempted on a green field.

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Image: Simplicius | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ruhr University Bochum: First After the War

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum - everybody says RUB - was founded in 1962, and instruction began in 1965. It was the first new public university Germany had founded since the Second World War. The Federal Republic had spent its first two decades rebuilding the institutions that alr...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Ruhr University Bochum: Concrete Fleet

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H005, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hentrich's design - 14 nearly identical high-rise faculty buildings arranged across the campus - is the largest pure expression of German brutalism. The buildings are gray concrete, ribbed and ribbed again, with horizontal window bands and vertical service cores. Walk between the...

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Image: H005 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ruhr University Bochum: Forty-Two Thousand

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tasto, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today RUB enrolls around 37,700 students and employs more than 6,400 staff, of whom over 400 are professors. That makes it one of the ten largest universities in Germany. It offers 184 different study programs across 21 faculties - the full sweep from Protestant Theology and Cath...

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Image: Tasto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ruhr University Bochum: Gardens, Organs, Floer

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MorphX, Public domain. Two unexpected things on the campus. The first is the Botanical Garden, on the slope below the towers, which contains the only southern-Chinese-style garden in Germany - bridges, ponds, calligraphy stones, designed in collaboration with horticulturists from Tongji University in S...

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Image: MorphX | Public domain

Ruhr University Bochum: A Harbor That Stayed

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ziko van Dijk, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Excellence Initiative of 2007 - Germany's federal competition to identify a handful of elite research universities - put RUB through several rounds. It made it deep into the contest but lost in the final cut. The result has shaped the campus's self-image: RUB sees itself as o...

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Image: Ziko van Dijk | CC BY-SA 3.0