Sharing the online lecture video held on April 13, 2021.

Lecture title: ‘Ondol Goes to America: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Korea-Inspired Dream’
Speaker: Robert J. Fouser

Summary:
In this lecture, I will discuss the history of ondol, or radiant-floor heating, in the US in the 20th century. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of America’s greatest architects, first experienced ondol in the Jaseondang that Okura Kihachiro had moved from Gyeongbokgung Palace to his estate in Tokyo. Ondol fascinated Wright and he later experimented with it in several US projects. In the mid-1930s he developed a hot water piping system for radiant floors in the Usonian houses that were built into the 1950s. Other experiments, including those by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, took place in the 1940s. The largest experiment in radiant-floor heating was in Levittown, New York, a mass-produced suburb developed from 1947 to 1951. Interest in radiant-floor heating declined from the mid-1950s but revived toward the end of the century with development PEX tubing and electric systems.

Bio:
Robert J. Fouser holds a B.A. in Japanese language and literature, and M.A. in applied linguistics, both from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in applied linguistics from Trinity College Dublin. He studied Korean language at Seoul National University in the 1980s. He lived in Japan from 1995 to 2008 where he taught foreign language education at Kyoto University and developed the Korean language program in Kagoshima University. From 2008 to 2014, he taught Korean as a second/foreign language education at Seoul National University. He is currently an independent scholar based in Providence, RI.

He also is the translator of Understanding Korean Literature (1997), co-author of Hanok: The Korean House (2015), and the author of five books in Korean, including Oegugeo Jeonpadam [The Spread of Foreign Languages] (2018) and Gakguk Dosi Tamgugi [Exploring Cities around the World] (2019). His new book, Oegugeo Hakseupdam [Thoughts on Learning Foreign Languages], will be published in May 2021. He also writes regular columns for media outlets in Korea.