Lecture halls from below and spaghetti in the loom

"Watch your head!" echoes through the narrow corridor. I pause, just a few centimetres in front of me: a large silver-colored pipe. "Be careful here, the corridors are not very high," warns Dirk Schnurr. Outside, the sun is blazing, inside LED lamps illuminate the corridor with a cool glow. I look past the pipe, behind which a corridor disappears into the belly of the university. Behind us, the metal door slams shut.

I carefully follow Schnurr on his journey. Today, the energy manager is giving me a foretaste of his tour "In the basements of the university", with which he will be taking guests into the university's substructure in November. It is one of 50 encounters that the university is organizing via an app to mark its anniversary. The special thing about it: The participants are assigned a meeting. "Instead of choosing topics on their own, our participants get to go to places they might not otherwise have gone to, with people they wouldn't otherwise meet: a great opportunity to leave the familiar behind and discover new things," explains app coordinator Kathrin Meckbach. "We have selected places for the 50 meetings, some of which are otherwise inaccessible. We want to give a glimpse behind the scenes of research and university operations." I also discover a new place. I had never thought about the basement rooms of the university and now I'm standing right in the middle of it. There is no longer any sound of the numerous students above us. The echo of working machines dominates. Metal ducts break through the monotony of the gray concrete walls. They run along the entire length of the corridor and are fitted with many thin cables.

"Pipes and cables run from the basements to every building on the campus. Electricity, water and heating - we can control it all centrally. The South Campus alone requires around 12,000 megawatt hours of heat every year. A large proportion of this is obtained as district heating from the municipal utilities and a smaller proportion is generated by our own combined heat and power plant. The amount corresponds to around 1.2 million liters of heating oil. Enough to heat 600 single-family homes for a year," says Schnurr. Door after door leads deeper into the labyrinth. "Don't worry, most people will find their way out again," he jokes.

A small staircase, three steps lead to a steel grid on which it is no longer possible to stand upright. Below us, large pipes transport water to the campus. Above us: gas pipes and cable ducts. Stooping, we make our way through the narrow, barely lit passage, surrounded by building services and accompanied by the clanging of metal. After a few meters, a staircase leads down, and standing is possible again. We have now arrived underneath lecture hall 1 in the Campus Center. I realize how elaborately the university is supplied. "Most people only notice that we're working when, for once, something doesn't work and the lecture hall remains cold," remarks Schnurr. We look into a small, dark adjoining room. The ceiling here slopes downwards in the shape of a staircase and some light enters the room through regular small holes. "These openings lead directly into the lecture hall above us. Depending on the time of year, hot and cold air enters the footwells of the rows of seats and maintains the temperature at 23 degrees. If you've ever wondered why you get cold feet during a lecture in midsummer, you now know the answer," Schnurr continues. "But like everywhere else, we are also mindful of our ecological footprint. We are constantly optimizing our energy consumption and striving to improve systems."

Different meetings, different locations

A total of 50 hosts are opening their doors. At the Institute of Materials Technology, for example, research is being conducted into what holds materials together. "We deliberately destroy samples and components and analyze what happens at an atomic level during a crash. We investigate the effects live in the laboratory. One thing is certain: things will break," promises Prof. Dr. Thomas Niendorf for his meeting "Atoms under stress - insights into everyday working life in materials technology". Prof. Dr. Nikola Roßbach will give a guided tour of literary Kassel, and guests will visit the teaching and learning garden in Witzenhausen.

The art academy will also be there. "I'm delighted to be able to present the Textile Study Workshop to the public," says Nadja Porsch as she welcomes us on the trial tour. She opens a door and we enter a large, brightly lit workshop. Various textile processing machines stand side by side in front of a large window. "This loom is still completely analog," explains Porsch, pointing to an object directly in front of us. "This is how our students learn the basics of weaving before moving on to the digital versions." Unfinished carpets hang on the walls, one of them with a large gap in the middle. "Here, a student made a mistake when stretching, and the work is unfortunately torn. But mistakes also teach us something about materials and their behavior. We have raw materials with a wide variety of properties at our disposal. Many of them also grow here in Germany. Instead of transporting materials halfway around the world, we could produce much more locally," says Porsch. The work here is not only theoretical, but also practical. I also get to prove myself in screen printing, a technology in which ink is printed onto a textile through a fine mesh. The choice of motifs is varied. Next to stencils for flower patterns leans one with three sushi rolls. "Our students designed these stencils themselves. They were able to give free rein to their creativity. That's what makes this work so appealing to me. Every day, students come up with new ideas and just try them out. Some things go wrong, but some things turn out to be innovative. One student has managed to create a paste for screen printing from shellfish," says Porsch. "Spaghetti has also been woven into it." The aim: "To investigate the static differences before and after cooking."

The app was programmed by FG ComTech and is available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play. Meetings will take place until spring 2022.
Info: www.50jahre-unikassel.de

This article appeared in the university magazine publik 2021/3. Text Dennis Müller