Lecture: Liliane Wong, “Adaptive Reuse | Time Mirrored”
Thursday, March 28, 5:30pm
1100 Architecture + Design Studios
Liliane Wong joins us for a lecture, followed by a conversation with Adjunct Associate Professor Melissa Rovner.
“Adaptive Reuse | Time Mirrored” explores reuse in the built environment over half a century to understand how a millennia-old and unremarkable practice, formally defined only in 1973, has come into its own in the 21st century.
Liliane Wong received her BA in Mathematics from Vassar College and her MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is Professor in the Department of Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design that focuses on architectural interventions to existing structures. Her interest and teaching in this subject led her to co-found the Int|AR Journal on Design Interventions & Adaptive Reuse that promotes creative and academic explorations of sustainable environments through exemplary works of reuse. She is the author of Adaptive Reuse in Architecture: A Typological Index, Adaptive Reuse_Extending the Lives of Buildings, co-author of Libraries – A Design Manual, co-editor of Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice. She was recognized by Design Intelligence for 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 as one of the top 25 most admired design educators in the US.
A long-time volunteer at soup kitchens, her teaching emphasizes the importance of public engagement in architecture and design. Other teaching and research areas include design as social activism, preservation and sea level rise, the mathematics of curved space, affordable modular housing and technical textiles. Recent projects include Crossing the Pell, an interactive/experiential exhibition on adapting infrastructure, Don’t You Sit Down, an installation on segregation and Jim Crow laws, Projecting Change, a community exhibition on the future of coastal neighborhoods in the era of sea level rise and Saving Superman, a collaboration with the Providence Preservation Society on the plight of the Industrial Trust Building.
A registered architect in Massachusetts, USA, she has practiced through her own firm, Mahon Wong Associates, as well as with the Boston firms of Perry Dean Rogers and FHCM. Key projects include the American Embassy in Jordan, Montclair Public Library, Hartford Public Library, and the design of the Kore Library Furnishings Line.
The UIC School of Architecture lecture series is free and open to the public.