Bulletin No. 2, 2014

Yao Ling Sun Professor of Architecture Shares Quest for ‘Right’ Answers  31  P rof. Ng Yan-yung Edward delivered his inaugural lecture on 21 October 2014 as Yao Ling Sun Professor of Architecture. In the lecture entitled ‘The Right Is To Be Done’, he revisited his journey of the past 15 years, with the aim of finding an answer to the question ‘What should be done to improve lives?’ Professor Ng remembered very well how Prof. Peter Tregenza , who taught him lighting design at the University of Nottingham, put forth the question ‘What should be done?’ when showing the poor living conditions of the British people after World War II. When Professor Ng returned to Hong Kong in 1999, he was surprised to find that many people still lived in poor and over-crowded conditions, without a suitable amount of daylight and proper air ventilation. Following in his teacher’s footsteps, he established an International Daylight Monitoring Station atop the water tower of New Asia College and formulated guidelines for daylighting design for the buildings of Hong Kong. After the outbreak of SARS in 2003, it became known that over-crowded urban conditions and lack of daylight and air ventilation exacerbated the epidemic. He was invited by the Planning Department of the HKSAR Government to look into the issue. The result was the Air Ventilation Assessment (AVA) methodology that he completed in 2006. His recommendations were adopted by the Government and all governmental projects now have to be assessed by the AVA system, including the redevelopment of what used to be Kai Tak Airport and the design of the new Government Headquarters. After the AVA project, Professor Ng was commissioned by the Government to conduct an indepth study on Hong Kong to achieve better urban planning. He completed the study in 2012 and produced the urban climatic map. He said, ‘I’m confident that we now have a better analytic tool to design our city better and to improve lives.’ Professor Ng and his team were then invited by various cities in the world, including Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City and Kaohsiung, to conduct studies to improve their urban environments. Recently during his travels, Professor Ng was saddened by the lives of wretched children living in poor and remote villages without electricity, running water, and access to modern amenities. These youngsters do not have knowledge of the outside world and their future seems bleak. Professor Ng initiated the ‘One University, One village’ rural sustainable development assistance programme. He said, ‘I firmly believe that if we from the universities cannot change lives for the better, we’re not doing what’s right. I don’t believe that with the knowledge, resources, people and talent of a university, we cannot make a difference to the lives of people living in a village.’ Together with teachers and students from Peking University, Stanford, Cambridge, and Kunming University of Science and Technology, Professor Ng set out to improve the livelihood of rural villages and bring villagers a better future.