Today, three universities exist in the Ruhr area with about 90.000 enrolled students, all universities were founded and built between 1960 and 1985. Designed as universities having undergone reformation, manifesting equal opportunities to study for all young people, extraordinary efforts were necessary to implement an ambitious building programme. An enormous construction volume, planned in a very short span of time, was built at considerably low costs. The university buildings in Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg and Essen are perfect examples to retrace the rise and fall of building systems types. Whereas in Bochum an international competition resulted in building a monumental prefabricated megastructure, other universities had to be content with a much more modest architecture. Different building systems were tested, culminating in the development of the building system titled “NRW 75”. This system was used for planning and building the TU Dortmund and The University of Essen. In the End, the newly developed system was discontinued in Duisburg before it had been completed.