Liliane Wong

Professor
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Liliane Wong
BA, Vassar College
MArch, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Liliane Wong’s focus on architectural interventions to existing structures led her to cofound the Int|AR Journal on design interventions and adaptive reuse, which promotes creative and academic explorations of sustainable environments through exemplary works of reuse. A longtime volunteer at soup kitchens, Wong emphasizes in her teaching the importance of public engagement in architecture and design.

Wong’s teaching and research areas include design as social activism, the mathematics of curved space, the affordable modular home and technical textiles. Recent work with students includes Don’t You Sit Down, an installation on Jim Crow laws, and Crossing the Pell, a multi-year investigation of adapting infrastructure, which has since become an immersive exhibition, part of which is installed in the US Capitol. Wong was recognized by Design Intelligence in 2018–19 as one of the top 25 most admired educators in the US in the fields of architecture, interiors and landscape architecture.

Wong is author of Adaptive Reuse in Architecture: A Typological Index and Adaptive Reuse: Extending the Lives of Buildings, co-author of Libraries – A Design Manual, contributing author of Designing Interior Architecture and Flexible Composite Materials in Architecture, Construction and Interiors and co-editor of Interventions and Adaptive Reuse: A Decade of Responsible Practice. A registered architect in Massachusetts, 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.

Academic areas of interest

In her teaching and research, Wong focuses on design for the homeless, the mathematics of curved space and affordable modular housing. Her philosophy and teaching on design for the homeless is included in Glimmer – how design can transform your life and maybe even the world by Warren Berger. In the past, her research on non-Euclidean math has been funded, in part, by a grant entitled Knit Space. As a member of the advisory board of Blu Homes, a modular home enterprise, she has incorporated her teaching and research in a studio known as Modular, Demountable + Green.

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Liliane Wong
BA, Vassar College
MArch, Harvard Graduate School of Design