The Occasion
In October 2018 the German New Zealand Chamber of Commerce invited Professor Ghaffarian to deliver a keynote on energy efficiency solutions in Auckland, together with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini. The Chamber was then building links between German energy efficiency firms and the New Zealand market, and its audience combined German and New Zealand companies looking for partners, products and evidence. The invitation was the first of two: the Chamber asked Prof Ghaffarian back the following year for its 2019 conference on energy efficient urban infrastructure.
The Keynote Address
The keynote opened with sustainability and divided the response into two halves. Hardware meant intelligent buildings: building management systems, smart and energy efficient devices, and energy efficient management and control. Software meant intelligent systems: BIM, integrated information management, and smart monitoring and control. Its thesis was that neither half delivers on its own, and that the energy efficient building of the future depends on integrating the two, a claim that reframes energy efficiency as a problem of information as much as equipment.
The address then widened the frame. Integration had to reach across academia and industry, and it had to be future proofed. Technologies such as mixed reality and holographic communication pointed to smart offices and new green potentials, in which less travel and more efficient use of space become part of a building’s energy performance. Research on psychological sustainability, using electroencephalography to read occupants’ responses, showed that performance is also a matter of how people feel in a building. The title’s movement from prototypes to an energy efficient future described this progression: from isolated demonstrations of intelligent technology to buildings in which systems, information and occupants work as one.
Think Effectively Before Acting
Having assembled the pieces, the keynote warned against assembling them carelessly. Its turning point was a single instruction, think effectively before acting, and a caution against becoming a victim of technology. Integration should be designed, not accumulated; the smartest building is the one whose systems work together toward a purpose, not the one with the most devices. For an audience of firms selling energy efficiency technologies, this was a pointed and useful message: the New Zealand market would reward solutions that fitted into integrated systems and penalise those that added complexity without performance.
The final section moved from the building to the city, toward a sustainable and healthy urban future. Green roofs and urban greening, the urban heat island, and buildings such as BIG’s 8 House served as evidence that energy efficiency and urban quality can be designed together rather than traded against each other.
The Evidence Base
Each part of the keynote corresponded to a body of published work. On the hardware side, a 2012 review led by Prof Ghaffarian on zero energy intelligent buildings had already linked building intelligence to sustainable development for future cities, and the analysis What is an intelligent building? became the most read article in the history of Architectural Science Review, with 51,627 views on the publisher’s site. In 2018 Prof Ghaffarian contributed to the CIB W098 research roadmap for intelligent and responsive buildings, in a critical debate on key performance indicators for the intelligent building.
On the software side, the keynote drew on Prof Ghaffarian’s nD BIM research, an integrated knowledge based building management system for inspecting energy efficiency after construction, cited 231 times, which is the integration of hardware and information that the address advocated. Tongrui Zhang, a doctoral candidate under Prof Ghaffarian’s primary supervision, was then completing a thesis on integrating BIM with building management systems in a New Zealand educational building, and had presented in January 2018 an electroencephalography based building management system to improve accessibility for disabled users. Later in 2018 Prof Ghaffarian led a paper on combining immersive technologies with electroencephalography for interaction with autonomous vehicles.
From Building Envelope to City
The energy efficient future of the title also rested on a body of work on the building envelope and on the energy performance of green buildings. Prof Ghaffarian and Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, with colleagues, reviewed the sustainable energy performance of green buildings, a paper cited 659 times, and the advantages and challenges of double skin façades, cited 337 times, while a 2016 review of passive wall systems for energy efficiency has been cited 402 times. This literature explains why the keynote treated devices with caution: much of the energy a building saves is decided by its form and envelope before any intelligent system is installed.
The city scale of the address rested on Prof Ghaffarian’s most cited work: the review of the environmental benefits of green roofs, cited 1,304 times, and the review of urban heat island mitigation in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong, cited 577 times. In April 2018 the two professors had also written, with colleagues, on smart technology for the industry readers of Build magazine.
Significance for Industry and the University
The keynote placed AUT research inside a conversation about trade and technology transfer, a setting in which academic evidence is judged by its usefulness to firms making investment decisions. That Prof Ghaffarian was invited back the following year, and that the 2019 presentation was released to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy for its public relations work, indicates how that evidence was received.
The year was also a formative one inside AUT. In 2018 Prof Ghaffarian founded the Architectural Engineering Lab, became Programme Director of the BE (Hons) Architectural Engineering and Industry Engagement Coordinator for the Architectural and Construction Engineering degree, and was appointed a Leading Researcher of the university. The keynote’s insistence on integration across disciplines and between academia and industry describes the purpose of those roles.
The psychological strand of 2018 has since grown into a research programme of its own: a co supervised doctorate on indoor thermal environments and occupants’ state of mind, a critical review of the built environment’s effect on measured brain activity, and a NZD 100,000 study of mental health and AI in New Zealand classrooms from a neuroarchitecture perspective, with a Neuroarchitecture Virtual Reality Lab established in 2025. Prof Ghaffarian’s note Comfort Is a Perception, Not a Number carries the same argument to a public audience.
The Complete Presentation
