Toward climate-positive futures
Caulfield East Victoria 3145
Australia
Architecture today faces its most urgent reckoning: how to build in a rapidly warming world, and how to do so equitably. At Monash University’s Department of Architecture, housed within Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA), this question sits at the heart of teaching, research, and practice. The appointment of Professor Erik L’Heureux as Head of Architecture signals MADA’s strengthened commitment to advancing climate-responsive and socially responsible design across Australia and the Indo-Pacific.
L’Heureux, arriving from the National University of Singapore, has long interrogated what he terms the “architecture of equatorial envelopes”, a rethinking of buildings as climatic mediators tailored to a warming world. His practice and research span net-zero adaptive reuse, equatorial housing prototypes, and atmospheric studies of hot and humid cities from Kuala Lumpur to Accra. Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize laureate and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, L’Heureux brings a global perspective that resonates with Monash’s mission to recast architecture’s responsibilities in the planetary South.
“Amidst the current global challenges of climate change and social injustice, the value of creative education and design research is paramount,” notes MADA Dean, Professor Mel Dodd. “Erik’s appointment enhances our international reputation in impactful, climate-adaptive design, perfectly aligned with Monash’s values and global campus footprint.”
Under his leadership, Monash Architecture continues to position climate not as a backdrop but at the center of architectural imagination—encouraging its large, diverse student body and internationally recognised faculty to view buildings as active agents in shaping resilient, inclusive, and decarbonised futures. For L’Heureux, the stakes are clear: “Architecture must play a critical role in shaping more resilient, inclusive, and decarbonised futures. In an age defined by climate catastrophe, carbon cannot remain peripheral; it must sit squarely at the heart of architectural discourse, pedagogy, and practice as we move from a fossil-fuelled world to one that is genuinely planet-positive.”
With a clear institutional commitment to Australia and the Indo-Pacific, Monash offers a powerful platform to extend these conversations. Drawing on decades of experience in Singapore and Southeast Asia, L’Heureux is eager to deepen the department’s regional networks and prepare students to engage critically with the contexts where many of them will go on to practice. “The opportunity to broaden engagement through research, teaching, and design practice within this dynamic and complex region is as crucial as it is energising.”
Through this appointment, Monash Architecture affirms its ambition not merely to respond to today’s crises, but to actively shape a future that is more just, sustainable, and beautiful—equipping the next generation of architects to lead with creativity, responsibility, and care.
About Monash Architecture
Embedded within Monash University—Australia’s largest research-intensive university and a member of the prestigious Group of Eight—the Department of Architecture is a globally connected community of more than 800 students, 50 international faculty, and 100 sessional staff. We offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in Architecture and Urban Planning and Design that engage the city of Melbourne, Greater Australia, and the Indo-Pacific region as living laboratories for design research.
Our research and teaching converge around some of the most urgent issues of our time: advancing housing, social and environmental justice, innovating construction processes for accessibility and affordability, addressing the challenges of informal settlements and environmental repair, radically reducing carbon emissions and energy use, and imagining new spatial, technological, and cultural futures for the planet. Over the past five years, architecture faculty members have secured more than USD 12.5 million in competitive research funding, supporting both cutting-edge traditional scholarship and creative practice based research.
Through our distinctive model of creative-practice impact, the Department of Architecture at Monash University tackles the major challenges facing society today with innovation, impact, and criticality. Our work is animated by a belief that architecture can be an agent of change—shaping a world that is more just, sustainable, and beautiful.
