The Occasion
The Architectural Science Association holds the annual international conference of architectural science in Australia and New Zealand, the principal meeting of the region’s research community in building science, environmental design and architectural technology. Its 54th conference, ANZAScA 2020, was hosted by AUT under the theme Imaginable Futures: Design Thinking, and the Scientific Method, supported by NZD 25,000 in AUT hosting funding. It addressed future buildings and living environments, and the critical thinking and practical advances in architectural science that could make urban futures smarter, more sustainable and more liveable. Delivered entirely online and free to attend, it had drawn more than 300 registrations by the eve of the opening day, well beyond the usual reach of a regional association meeting (AUT event record).
Opening, Officiating and Closing
As Conference Chair, Professor Ghaffarian delivered the opening and officiating keynote that formally opened the conference, and the closing address that brought it to a close. The two addresses carry different responsibilities. An opening and officiating address speaks for the host institution and the association together: it constitutes the meeting, sets out what the community has gathered to examine, and establishes the standards by which the following days will be judged. A closing address is a summation, drawing the strands of the programme together and turning the community’s attention to what comes next.
In November 2020 both carried unusual weight. Delegates joined from homes and offices across Australia, New Zealand and beyond, without the shared venue that normally gives a conference its sense of occasion. The opening had to supply that occasion by argument alone. The conference theme gave it the material: the pairing of design thinking with the scientific method is the same pairing on which Prof Ghaffarian’s research is built, in work that treats architecture and engineering as one inquiry, from his studies of courtyards and outdoor thermal comfort to his reviews of intelligent buildings and green building performance. To open ANZAScA 2020 on that theme was to set out an intellectual position he had held for more than a decade, and to close it was to measure what the community’s papers had added to that position.
Standing in the Architectural Science Community
The invitation to chair ANZAScA 2020 rested on a long engagement with the association and its journal culture. A paper by Prof Ghaffarian and Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini with colleagues had been presented at the 51st conference, ANZAScA 2017 in Wellington, on the impacts of sick building syndrome, a line of work published the following year as Sick building syndrome: are we doing enough? in Architectural Science Review and since cited 373 times. In 2017 his work was featured in the 60th Anniversary Special Edition of Architectural Science Review and in the newsletters of ANZAScA and the journal.
Architectural Science Review is also where his most widely read article appeared: the analysis of what makes a building intelligent, which has become the most read article in the journal’s history. From 2021 to 2023 Prof Ghaffarian served as an Associate Editor of the journal with Taylor & Francis. The chair of ANZAScA 2020 was therefore not an outside host but a member of the community whose standards the conference upholds, which gave the opening and closing addresses an authority that a purely institutional host could not have offered.
Chairmanship Through Disruption
The conference took place when many academic meetings were being cancelled outright. Prof Ghaffarian had served on the association’s Executive Board from 2019 to 2020 during the preparation of the conference, so the decision to proceed was taken by someone who understood both the association’s obligations and the host’s capacity. Proceeding online, and making attendance free, kept the association’s annual meeting alive and opened it to students, practitioners and researchers who could not normally have travelled to Auckland.
The decision carried risk. An online meeting can feel thin, and scholarly exchange suffers without the informal conversation of a physical venue. The scale of registration suggests the judgement was sound: the conference reached a wider audience than a conventional meeting would have done, without lowering the review standards of a peer reviewed proceedings. Prof Ghaffarian was leading Built Environment Engineering at AUT at the time, so the conference also tested, early in that role, the combination of academic judgement, institutional coordination and financial stewardship that conference leadership demands.
A Legacy in Publication
The enduring record of ANZAScA 2020 is its proceedings, Imaginable Futures: Design Thinking, and the Scientific Method (ISBN 978-0-9923835-7-2), which Prof Ghaffarian edited with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Associate Professor Nicola Naismith, and for which the three editors wrote the foreword. The volume is also catalogued in the University of Melbourne repository, placing it within the association’s continuing scholarly record.
The proceedings show the conference serving as a platform for the next generation of New Zealand researchers. Doctoral work that Prof Ghaffarian supervised appeared in the volume: Megan Burfoot’s virtual classroom environments for intelligent acoustic simulation, part of the doctorate later shortlisted for the NZGBC Future Thinker Award; Kamal Dhawan’s two papers on consolidating construction loads and optimising construction consolidation centres in New Zealand; and Jas Qadir’s two papers on strategic decision making for public investment in regenerative projects. Each of these candidates went on to complete a doctorate, which gives the proceedings a life beyond the conference itself.
From ANZAScA to a Conference Portfolio
ANZAScA 2020 marks the point at which Prof Ghaffarian’s conference leadership moved from contribution to stewardship. Since 2006 Prof Ghaffarian has served on the scientific committees of more than 100 international conferences, the Architectural Science Association among them; chairing its annual meeting placed him at the head of a regional scholarly community rather than within it.
The experience informed what followed. In 2024 Prof Ghaffarian co-chaired SASBE 2024 with CIB W116, a conference that published 165 peer reviewed papers in Springer Nature’s Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, and in the same year Prof Ghaffarian led the host department for IGLC32, the first International Group for Lean Construction conference held in New Zealand. In 2025 the GDI series was founded by Prof Ghaffarian with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, whose inaugural edition received more than 200 full papers. The 2026 edition, combining an in person Industry Chapter with an online academic conference open worldwide, builds on the reach first demonstrated in 2020: the lesson of ANZAScA was that a well run online meeting widens a scholarly community rather than diminishing it.