Humanities’ facelift

Refurbishment work on the humanities building has taken place over the summer and is expected to continue until mid November as part of “major maintenance and updating works taking place across the University”.

The refurbishment includes a redesign of the building’s main entrances, replacement of the lifts and repainting and carpeting the interiors.

In recent years there have been growing calls from academics and students alike to replace the humanities building, which was seen as old fashioned and unsuitable for its present role and number of students. Ed Hunt, History Department student-staff liaison secretary told the Boar that concerns over the suitability of the humanities building had been addressed to the Vice Chancellor last year.

In a meeting with officials however “we were told that the University is under a lot of financial pressure, and that state funding for the arts is extremely tight” and as a result a new building was not considered viable in the near future. The renovations are widely seen as an intermediate solution, giving the building a new lease of life until the university is in a position to replace it permanently.

Reactions to the renovations have been mixed. Hunt expressed concerns to that the university seemed to be carrying out the renovation as much for the benefit of conference organisers as students and staff, something he perceives “to be symptomatic of the decreasing emphasis on the University as a centre for study”.

However one academic who spoke to the Boar was optimistic about the work, stating that although “disruptive” the renovation was preferable to a new humanities building, which would be unlikely to have the same size offices and teaching spaces. He did however concede that the fundamental problems with the building, like the narrow corridors would inevitably remain unsolved by a limited refurbishment.

The humanities building was part of the first phase of Warwick buildings constructed in the 1960’s by Eugene Rosenberg, a Czech architect who ‘insisted that he was creating an environment rather than mere buildings.’ The modernist exterior of Humanities and other campus buildings of that era was intended to reflect the optimistic attitude of the new post-war universities, at odds with the opulence and antiquity of established universities like Oxford and Cambridge.

To some students however it seems that the humanities building is now coming to represent the growing emphasis on more lucrative subject areas to the cost of traditional but less profitable arts subjects.