New Veterinary Medicine Center: Topping Out at LMU Oberschleissheim

The strains of accordion music echo through the concrete edifice. Site fences still stand in front of the building, cables and bare ceilings are still visible. Yet one gets the impression that operations could soon begin here: The windows are in place, the heating is on and, despite the cold temperatures, it is warm inside. Numerous guests—representatives of the university, politicians, building administrators, architects, construction workers and faculty staff—have gathered between the site fencing and the concrete pillars.

On the campus of LMU’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Oberschleissheim, near Munich, the topping out ceremony for two new buildings is being celebrated: A central teaching and office building with a canteen is nearing completion, as is a library.

Completion scheduled for 2027

The construction project is part of the ongoing development of the Veterinary Medicine Campus. The Free State of Bavaria approved a total cost of around 75.5 million euros for the two buildings. Construction work began in November 2024, with the groundbreaking ceremony taking place in February 2025. If everything continues to go according to plan, the buildings will be completed in May 2027.

The larger of the two buildings will house administrative offices, teaching facilities and a canteen. It will have usable floor space of almost 9,000 square meters and will contain offices, seminar rooms, a skills lab for practical exercises for students, and two lecture halls with a total of around 500 seats. The canteen should be able to serve up to 1,500 meals a day and will seat 346 people. A separate cafeteria space will have an additional 98 seats.

A library measuring around 3,400 square meters is being built next door. It is slated to house a collection of around 100,000 books and journals, about 150 individual workplaces and facilities for group work.

“Today we are celebrating another milestone for LMU's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine,” said Thomas Jenkel, Head of the Munich II State Construction Authority, in his welcome address. This is also one of the first major Free State-sponsored construction projects at LMU to be awarded to a single general contractor who is responsible for both planning and construction.

Bavaria's Minister of State for Housing, Construction and Transport, Christian Bernreiter, also points to the rapid progress of construction: “Just over a year after the ground was broken, we are already celebrating the topping out ceremony today: That is impressively fast—made possible by positive cooperation between users, the construction authority and the general contractor,” he said. Both the main building—complete with lecture halls, a canteen and the dean's office – and the library will become a central meeting place on the Oberschleissheim campus in the future.

At the topping out ceremony, Science Minister Markus Blume declared that the LMU campus in Oberschleissheim would become “the center for modern veterinary medicine in Europe”. The new main building and library, he said, would create ideal conditions for cutting-edge research and education.

The university management, too, sees local expansion as crucial and is focusing primarily on developing the Oberschleissheim site. “Research needs infrastructure,” says LMU Vice President Benedikt Grothe. Facilities for teaching, libraries and canteens are fundamental prerequisites for a university to run smoothly, he adds, but their importance is often underestimated. Grothe argues that, especially with rising student numbers and increasingly complex research, the university must provide sufficient space for study, dialogue and administration.

The Dean of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Reinhard Straubinger, likewise speaks of an important step forward for the faculty. For many years, it was spread across several locations, with some facilities located on Königinnenstrasse near the English Garden. This traditional location, however, was increasingly straining at its limits. Lectures, research facilities and administrative offices were far apart from each other, such that frequent trips between them became “business as usual” for students and staff.

Bringing the faculty together in one place

Now, the campus in Oberschleissheim is set to fundamentally change this situation. Several buildings have already been erected here in recent years, including veterinary clinics and research buildings for the faculty. In the future, all these new buildings will bring large parts of the faculty's teaching, research activities and administration together in one place. For students and teachers, this will above make it much simpler to organize the everyday study and work routine, while also creating more space for teaching and research.

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For Oberschleissheim's mayor, Markus Böck, the growing campus is also an important project for the community, as the university brings more and more research and academic life to the municipality. Böck is proud of this development. He admits that it also brings new challenges—in relation to traffic and housing, for example. Yet at the same time, it naturally gives a tangible boost to the wider community, strengthening Oberschleissheim’s standing as a venue for science and research.

As the ceremony continued, the benediction of the church was given in the building. A Catholic and a Protestant clergyman said a prayer together and blessed the new building. The assembled guests then went back outside to the construction site. From the crane, two foremen recited the traditional topping out speech, praising both builders and craftsmen. After each verse, as is the German tradition at these ceremonies, a glass of wine was emptied. At the end, the glasses were thrown onto the gravel floor, where they shattered with a loud, high-pitched tinkle. Above them, a garland decorated with fir greenery now adorns the new building.

With the garland raised, the topping out ceremony reached its traditional climax: a brief moment when the construction site seems to stand still and all eyes turn upwards. Meanwhile, a topping out feast of roast pork, dumplings and other local delicacies was already beginning indoors—for the invited guests, but above all for the construction workers, craftsmen and everyone who made this building possible in the first place.

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