The Kolleg Marsilius-Arkaden

Origin of the Arkaden

There were various concepts presented for how to use the University building at the entrance to the Heidelberg district of Neuenheimer Feld, which ended up being dismissed for a variety of reasons. The idea of building the Marsilius Arkaden was finally proposed by the Unterländer Studienfonds foundation, which announced a European architectural and investor competition in 2007. The winning project development design was submitted by the Heidelberg developer and investor, Andreas Epple, together with the architectural firm “hübner + erhard und partner” (now “Element A”). Construction began in October 2013 and the Marsilius Arkaden was completed at the end of 2015. The architectural project created 20,000m² of space for scientific work, clinical research, and campus housing.

A New Landmark on the Neckar

The Marsilius Arkaden, a cluster of three buildings on the south side of the University campus in Neuenheimer Feld near the Surgery Clinic, is located along the Neckar River. The ten-story north and south towers of the complex stand on columns and are connected by two-story porticos. The porticos extend across the north-south axis in Neuenheimer Feld from the Mensa to the Neckar River. The portico areas offer spacious rooms for conferences and lectures. There is also a small cafe and an ecumenical center for campus and hospital chaplaincy. Due to their slate material, the lower floors stand out from the other floors, which are made of light plaster. The thirteen-story west tower, on the other hand, has darker aluminum sheet cladding. The three towers include an inner courtyard that is openly accessible, thus inviting visitors to pause and enjoy the space. 

The west tower mainly is used for office space for departments of Heidelberg University Hospital and the medical faculty, and the south tower houses staff apartments for the hospital. The lower floors of the north tower, from which the Marsilius Kolleg takes its name, has been occupied by the Kolleg since April 2016. The University Hospital’s Center for Information and Medical Technology (ZIM) are located on the floors above the Kolleg, while the upper floors also contain further apartments for students and visiting scholars.

The Art of the Building

The Marsilius Arkaden art competition was also announced as part of the construction project. Seven master students from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart were given the opportunity to submit their contributions to the artistic design of the new building. The applicants were given the theme “HumanNature -NatureHuman” as a prompt. The eleven-member jury awarded first prize to two works by Ludwigsburg artist Nina Bergold. Her works “Circulation” and “Suchende” can be viewed in the foyers of the west and north towers.

“Circulation” in the West Tower is correlated with the architecture of the staircase in the porticos, says Prof. Dr. Henry Keazor, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Heidelberg. Not only does the work, which consists of a series of dynamic lines in orange and blue, cover the respective end walls of the porticos, the line compositions also cover the beams of the foyer that run parallel to the gallery. The fluctuation of the lines forms a constantly changing whole as you walk through the space.

Bergold’s work, “Suchende,” presented in the foyer of the Marsilius Kolleg, works with the tension between abstraction and image association; only at second glance does a human figure appear from the lines and is a “Suchende” recognized, only to dissolve again in the entanglement of lines. The interdisciplinary research approach at the College is to find new approaches and to open up the space for new insights about the world and humans through interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Through the artwork, Bergold poses questions to the “Suchende” that science has yet to answer definitively: “What do we actually see if our self-perception and perception itself are only part of what we want to see? Is it even possible to see ourselves apart from our intended perception or is perception always an approximation? The “Suchende,” says Bergold, tries to recognize things, to ‘see through.’