An interactive Talk with Boon Lay Ong, University of Melbourne

Time: 18:00
Date: Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Room: H-1124, Hall Building, 1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard West

Coupling thermal experience with aesthetics is problematic. Whilst the intimate relationship between architecture and thermal experience (and climate) is undisputed, the relationship is largely seen as functional and concerned with comfort rather than the higher values and aspirations of aesthetics. Even Lisa Heschong, in her treatise on Thermal Delight in Architecture (1979), hesitates to describe our thermal experience as aesthetic (although she did lift it to the level of the sacred). While hugely popular, the ideas launched in her book did not find much traction and were not developed by her or others in subsequent years. I came to this position from a separate path 30 years later even though I count myself as one of her fans. Responding to heat is central in architecture both in terms of design and performance. But just how important is heat? Can we call the thermal experience aesthetic? Does it matter? These are just some of the questions to be explored with Dr. Boon Lay Ong in this Q&A.  

Biography:

Boon-Lay Ong wanted to be an architect since he was 12 but was bewildered by the abstraction that underpinned architectural education. He first latched onto acoustics as a way of understanding space and architecture and later expanded this into environmental manipulation of the senses – in particular, heat (climate), light and sound. Still dissatisfied, he explored architecture as ecology – in part driven by sustainability concerns and in part his search for a design philosophy. His journey took him first to New Zealand, where he received his Bachelors of Architecture as well as a Masters of Architecture (in acoustics), to Singapore, where he taught and developed some appreciation of architecture as environmental mediator, to the United Kingdom, where he read for a PhD on the integration of plants and architecture, back to Singapore, where he developed a Masters of Landscape Architecture program and directed a Masters of Science (Environmental Management) and currently, to Australia, where he holds a post on Environmentally Sustainable Design. Among his various publications, he is looking forward to a new book, Beyond Environmental Comfort, by Routledge in 2013. Now approaching his sixties, he still hopes to be an architect one day.