Professor Xing Ruan, Chair of Architecture Discipline Group, will deliver a keynote lecture at the upcoming AASA (Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia) 2009 International Conference: Sustainable theory / theorizing sustainability, to be held in Wellington, New Zealand on 4-5 September.
The conference will explore the webs of association between theory and sustainability. Professor Ruan’s keynote lecture, entitled Architectural Enclosure, Topophilia and Topophobia, will offer a humanist dimension to the current debate on sustainability. It opens a conversation on the felt qualities in architecture.
The keynote lecture begins with the problem of interior in architecture, which seems to have been taken for granted, or even forgotten in modern times – transparency (the extensive use of glass in buildings), for example, has diminished the demarcation between the interior and the exterior. Professor Ruan will depict the ambience of an internalised architectural enclosure in a pre-modern scenario, and consider the consequences of human experience when the interior is lost in the twentieth century.
Professor Ruan also considers the architectural problem of interior and exterior, “an enduring human paradox of topophilia and topophobia, which is necessary for sustaining an interactive and legible relationship between the humans and the built world.”
UNSW Built Environment's Blog 