A snapshot of 2009

In this year at Warwick:

The Copper Rooms opened. Building these involved the demolition of the back of the old Students’ Union.
The Dirty Duck opened (a traditional pub, the name of which was chosen after a student vote).
The Indoor Tennis Centre at Westwood, the International Digital Laboratory and the Clinical Trials Unit received BREEAM Excellent Status in recognition of their high levels of environmental sustainability.
By summer 2009 350 staff had registered with WarwickShare.
2009 saw the announcement of the appointment of the University’s own dedicated police officer responsible for patrolling the 750 acres of main campus in a police buggy in order to keep campus safe for its residents.
Warwick’s first ever Alumni Weekend took place – with arts and sporting events, guided tours and talks on the Saturday (followed by a dinner and disco in the brand new union). On the Sunday there was a hog roast lunch, the Warwick Shootout Film Competition and SPLAT arts festival.
The Duke of Kent visited Warwick HRI at Wellesbourne to look at the work being carried out there.
The reopening of Butterworth Hall was marked with a gala concert having been closed for a year to be refurbished.

Lucia Koch's work includes major site specific interventions in architecture across the world. She manipulates and enhances features of a building, largley through the play of light. She was intrested in the way that the Digilab had the potential to create virtual experiences. Initially, she planned to use digital technology to affect the light throughout the building but following extensive discussions, she decided to find a way to bring the unregulated, outside world into the building. She chose to work with the windows in three sites, by adding colour filters cut in the shape of traditional, domestic windows.

These filters ask the spectator to revisit their first impressions of the building. They act as an inverted palimsest; rather than seeing traces of the old through the new, the old has been superimposed upon the new. The works provide a sense of the domestic environment within this institutional building and introduce the largely unremarked language of vernacular windows, specific to different countries and continents, into this British location. Within a building where a constant environment is maintained by its orientation and the regulation of light and air by computer, the coloured filters heighten the play of light outside, the passing of the day, the changing weather and seasons.

And in the world:

Senator Barack Obama was inaugurated as the United States of America’s first African American President.
Michael Jackson died of a cardiac arrest.
Usain Bolt set a new world record of 9.58s for the men’s 100m.
The World Health Organization declared H1N1 influenza strain, commonly referred to as "swine flu", as a global pandemic.
The deadliest bushfires in Australian history ( Black Saturday bushfires ) in the Australian state of Victoria left 173 people dead and more than 2000 homes destroyed.

2009

Colour Corrections: Violet | Lucia Koch