The New Architecture School is an innovative adaptive reuse proposal for a new type of central campus building in the city of Siegen. Developed through a multi staged participatory process with students, faculty staff and community members, NAS aims to be a new urban agent, merging academia, culture, and public space. The program ranges from an Architecture Museum on the ground floor – a seamless continuation of the near by city centre, a large studio spaces as the heart of the school and a grand open space on the top floor.

The organizational principle aims to connect NAS with its immediate neighborhood, the city and the region by being able to host day to day student activities as well as public lectures and large cultural events. The conversion and extension of the existing printing facility, a modular concrete structure from the nineteen seventies, was approached through a light weight strategy combining mass timber in the interior and a modular steel-timber hybrid structure including a large hanging timber roof on the top-floor. The climate concepts of low tech uses un-heated spaces as expansion zones for students which at the same time serve as a climatic buffer zone (Mid-Doors). The landscape strategy aims to unseal large parts of the immediate surrounding carparks and renaturalize the adjacent river. The new square is open to the public and offers access to the natural landscape along the floating river.