Location & approach

By car

The campus of the Technical University of Dortmund is located near the freeway junction Dortmund West, where the Sauerland line A45 crosses the Ruhr expressway B1/A40. The Dortmund-Eichlinghofen exit on the A45 leads to the South Campus, the Dortmund-Dorstfeld exit on the A40 leads to the North Campus. The university is signposted at both exits.

By bus and train

The "Dortmund Universität" S-Bahn station is located directly on the North Campus. From there, the S-Bahn line S1 runs every 15 or 30 minutes to Dortmund main station and in the opposite direction to Düsseldorf main station via Bochum, Essen and Duisburg. In addition, the university can be reached by bus lines 445, 447 and 462. Timetable information can be found on the homepage of the Rhine-Ruhr Transport Association, and DSW21 also offer an interactive route network map.

The H-Train

The H-train is one of the landmarks of the TU Dortmund. Line 1 runs every 10 minutes between Dortmund Eichlinghofen and the Technology Center via Campus South and Dortmund University S, while Line 2 commutes every 5 minutes between Campus North and Campus South. It covers this distance in two minutes.

By plane

From Dortmund Airport, the AirportExpress takes a good 20 minutes to Dortmund Central Station and from there the S-Bahn (suburban train) takes you to the university. A wider range of international flight connections is offered by Düsseldorf Airport, about 60 kilometers away, which can be reached directly by S-Bahn from the university station.

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Location & approach

By car

The campus of the Technical University of Dortmund is located near the freeway junction Dortmund West, where the Sauerland line A45 crosses the Ruhr expressway B1/A40. The Dortmund-Eichlinghofen exit on the A45 leads to the South Campus, the Dortmund-Dorstfeld exit on the A40 leads to the North Campus. The university is signposted at both exits.

By bus and train

The "Dortmund Universität" S-Bahn station is located directly on the North Campus. From there, the S-Bahn line S1 runs every 15 or 30 minutes to Dortmund main station and in the opposite direction to Düsseldorf main station via Bochum, Essen and Duisburg. In addition, the university can be reached by bus lines 445, 447 and 462. Timetable information can be found on the homepage of the Rhine-Ruhr Transport Association, and DSW21 also offer an interactive route network map.

The H-Train

The H-train is one of the landmarks of the TU Dortmund. Line 1 runs every 10 minutes between Dortmund Eichlinghofen and the Technology Center via Campus South and Dortmund University S, while Line 2 commutes every 5 minutes between Campus North and Campus South. It covers this distance in two minutes.

By plane

From Dortmund Airport, the AirportExpress takes a good 20 minutes to Dortmund Central Station and from there the S-Bahn (suburban train) takes you to the university. A wider range of international flight connections is offered by Düsseldorf Airport, about 60 kilometers away, which can be reached directly by S-Bahn from the university station.

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Carsten Ruhl

short CV

Foto von Carsten Ruhl

Carsten Ruhl is Professor for Architectural History at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main as well as the spokesperson for the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA). From 2010 to 2013, he was Professor for the Theory and History of Modern Architecture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, and from 2003 to 2010 Professor for Architectural History at the Ruhr University in Bochum. He studied architecture, art history, philosophy and historiography, and focuses on the history and theory of architecture since the 18th century.

Abstract

Foto von Carsten Ruhl

The Monument between Crisis and Myth

The fact cannot be overlooked that, historically, the debate surrounding architectural monuments has always played an important role whenever economic, political and social systems of order are on the brink of collapse. Reflection on the monument is therefore always connected with an analysis of the respective disposition of a society and its architecture. And here lies – according to my thesis – the real potential of the architectural concept of the monument for the present discussion. The relationship between the building task of the museum and a monument seems to me to be a particularly fruitful starting point: the monumentalization of architecture and the museification of historical monuments have been inextricably linked since the 18th century. Connected with the term monument is not only one specific architectural technique that would have been lost in Modernism. On the contrary, our current understanding of monumentality as a genuine architectural quality leads directly into the self-image of Modernism. Or put differently, what we understand by monumentality in architecture today – be it negatively of positively connoted – is a modern construct. A myth, whose meaning does not coincidentally correspond with the crisis of representation in the Enlightenment: whereas in earlier times monumentum simply meant all marks, traces, objects and symbols that were able to at least temporarily suspend the mechanism of forgetting, the term has since come to embody a rhetoric of overwhelming power still effective today.

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