2002
2002
2006
Opening of Arenberg Campus Library
Opening of STUK Arts Centre
Establishment of KH Leuven campus on the Gasthuisberg site
Arenberg Campus When you drive into Leuven, you will be struck immediately by how green the surroundings still are. This green lung is formed by the combination of the Arenberg Campus with Heverlee Forest and the Meerdaal Forest. Thanks to the German Arenberg family - which donated the estate to the University after WW1 - the departments of Science and Technology have found themselves majestic accommodation there. At a time when every university was looking for space to house its scientific institutes, Arenberg Castle - with its aristocratic towers and battlements - was a godsend for K.U.Leuven, which laid the first stone of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Metallurgy and Chemical Engineering there as long ago as 1922. Although the machine hall of the Thermotechnical Institute, with its steam engine in the middle, has become an attraction for industrial archaeologists, the campus has expanded considerably, been modernised and matched to the pace of technological progress. In the park you also regularly come across greenhouses and hothouses. These belong to the agricultural institute, which is, among other things, the world centre for the cultivation of bananas and stands to the right of the castle. The Electrical Engineering Institute has also taken root there. Just outside the town, FABER, the Faculty of Kinesiology and Rehabilitation Sciences, has extensive facilities consisting of a venerable gymnasium, a trendy fitness building plus sports fields and training grounds, an athletics track and swimming pool and a large multi-functional sports hall.
FABER was established in 1937 by the young lecturer P.P. De Nayer who, at the request of the rector, Mgr. Ladeuze, was to develop lectures on sports medicine, to rejuvenate student sports and attend to the building of a sports institute.The success of the course and the indoor sports ensured that a complete large, new sport complex was opened in 1969, ushering in a new epoch in the history of Leuven university sport. Out of gratitude to the driving force behind it, the complex was named after Professor De Nayer. The best kept secret of the Arenberg Campus is the Arenberg Campus Library (CBA), which resides in the former Celestine monastery in de Croylaan. It is one of the biggest and most modern science and engineering libraries in continental Europe. CBA houses a million books and reference works under one roof. Students, academics, alumni and other visitors can work there in a high tech environment full of multimedia solutions. In an open riverside landscape, just outside the park on the other side of the Dijle, we find the white buildings of the Faculty of Science: mathematics and physics, IT and chemistry and recently also the earth sciences, which are most appropriately housed in a striking red brick building. By the motorway the campus is fringed by the ‘science park’, brand new quarters for spinoffs from the university.
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