Goossens building

The building was named after Thomas Goossens, the institution’s first Rector Magnificus, after it had been called Building C until 2006. This kind of made sense: the first building on campus was called A (now Cobbenhagen building) and the second was called B (now Koopmans building). Building C was completed in 1972 at the same time as building B. Buildings A, B and C were all designed by architect Jos Bedaux.

The building (picture, at the right) incorporated a large lecture hall, which, after renovation, is still in its virtually original state. And, like at the beginning, the building is still the home of the Computer Center, one of the predecessors of the current Library and IT Services department. Its servers are used, for example, to arrange University Library workplace reservations, whose numbers are going up year by year: if there were 103,927 reservations in 2014, numbers had risen to 163,120 only two years later. The Study Guide, another service provided by IT services, was consulted 800,000 times in the first month of the 2017-2018 academic year. Since the turn of the century, a multitude of departments, institutes and companies have had their home on the street side of the building’s ground floor. Initially these were university organizations, such as the Krities Informatie Sentrum and Tilburg University Press. After that, shops and businesses moved in, such as the Gianotten book shop, which was established there for about ten years. Since 2014, it has been the location of coffee giant Starbucks, pavement café and all. In 2017 a small supermarket (Albert Heijn) moved in.

Relief sculpture

One wall of the lecture hall has been adorned with a brick relief sculpture by artist Lucas van Hoek, another one of whose works is in the Simon Building. On the ground floor, there is a bronze bust of Goossens made by Albert Termote. In the hall, there is a work of art by Rob Moonen called Natura Artis Magistra, purchased in 2007 and showing, on four screens, processes of growth, flowering, tides and other natural phenomena in slow motion.