AudiMAX Lecture Hall and Study Center to Be Officially Opened

For decades, planning for Neuenheimer Feld has foreseen a structural campus focus near the central student refectory, the Theoretikum, and the physics institutes. The audiMAX lecture hall and study center, which took six years to complete, will fulfil an important function on the campus, notably for student affairs and teaching, information, communication and scientific exchange. The Auditorium Maximum has pride of place – a lecture theater with over 900 places and the largest at Heidelberg University. Added to this, there are seminar and training rooms as well as two science lecture halls, each seating 270, which can be joined together to make another large venue.
The building complex, accessible from all sides, with a usable surface of around 8,700 square meters, features an open building structure and is linked to the campus outside by means of generous-sized "study stairs" with steps that can also serve as seats. Alongside the central campus library with about 440 reading and study places, spacious study and common areas provide facilities for private study, group work, meet-ups and communication. Some of the over 120 study places freely available to students are media-equipped. The entrance hall is designed to cater for different event formats and, in addition, to showcase university collections and museums. The area outside the audiMAX can also be used for events, with the staircase forming a kind of ‘gallery’.
"For over 30 years, the Klaus Tschira Stiftung has been supporting research, education and science communication in the natural sciences, mathematics and computer science", says Lilian Knobel, Co-President of the foundation. "Over the course of these years we have also erected several prominent buildings for science and research, since space shapes teaching, learning and interaction."
"Precisely in a digital age, genuine encounter and direct dialogue at attractive central places like the newly created lecture hall and study center on the Im Neuenheimer Feld campus remain essential preconditions for successful teaching and mutual exchange," underlines Baden-Württemberg’s science minister Petra Olschowski.