Architects and civil engineers train together at the faculty under the Dortmund model for the building industry. The model is unique in Germany and represents a teaching concept that, in addition to the fundamental training in the chosen discipline, aims to give students interdisciplinary collaboration in a team with other engineers involved in construction. Projects involving joint work in a team of Architecture and Civil Engineering students take on a key role for the learning about this collaboration.

There are two annual academies at the faculty – the Ruhr International Spring Academy and the Venice Summer Academy. In the two-week workshops for these, students work together with students from the partners from Venice, Turin, Eindhoven, Düsseldorf, etc. on various design tasks in mixed international teams and talk about their results in the final discussion groups with international visiting professors.

The faculty has a workshop for model-making, a CIP pool, a departmental library, a media laboratory and an Institute of Building Research.

A key research area of the department is permanent structures. The aim is in-depth analysis and clarification of the issue of how buildings and civil engineering structures need to be designed and constructed to give them a life span that is appropriate for their purpose and resource usage. In line with the principle of resource-efficient building, this area is concerned with effectively increasing the life span of architectural structures using new extended planning and design concepts while taking into account the requirements in the lifecycle.

The department partners with the CET – Centre for Entrepreneurship & Transfer.