The Occasion
On 27 January 2018 the New Zealand Academy of Applied Research held its fourth international event at the GTower Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. Four conferences ran together on a single day: the International Conference on Architecture, Landscape and Interior Design (ALI 2018); Urban Design and Cities Planning (UDCP 2018); Sustainability, Green Buildings, Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy (SGER 2018); and Civil Engineering, Construction Management and Structural Design (CCS 2018). It was the last event in the series, and in hindsight its most mature: four themed conferences, keynotes of international standing and proceedings indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection.
A Chairmanship of Curation
Professor Ghaffarian chaired the event and led its programme and keynote sessions. As co-founder of the Academy with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Farnaz Sheikh, Prof Ghaffarian also carried responsibility for its scientific standards and its proceedings. At the fourth edition the chair’s task had shifted from establishing a series to deciding what it should stand for, and the keynote programme is the clearest evidence of that judgement.
Four keynote papers framed the day. Robert Powell, a leading writer on architecture in Southeast Asia, addressed critical regionalism and architectural identity in Malaysia. Karl Wagner examined the consequences of a possible unpredictable global cooling for green building strategies. Gregers Reimann argued for reconnecting with nature, and Norhaslina Hassan and colleagues presented the work of establishing a carbon baseline for the University of Malaya. The sequence moved from cultural identity to climate risk to institutional carbon accounting. That range reflects the conviction on which Prof Ghaffarian built the series: that architecture, environment and engineering are best discussed in one room, because the questions the built environment faces do not respect disciplinary boundaries. It also placed independent scholarship, practice and a major university’s own operations on the same platform, a balance that later defined his conference leadership.
Leadership in Practice
Chairing a single day multi conference event places unusual demands on its chair. Four tracks must be reviewed to one standard, scheduled without collision and drawn together in a single proceedings, while the keynote programme must speak to all of them at once. The chair answers for the coherence of the whole, and for the decisions about what to accept and what to decline that determine whether an indexing service will continue to recognise the series. January 2018 retained the Web of Science indexing first achieved in July 2017, which is the clearest evidence that those standards held as the series grew from 18 papers to 33.
The keynote topics also connected with Prof Ghaffarian’s own scholarship. Karl Wagner’s question about green building strategies under an unpredictable climate addressed the territory of the review of sustainable energy performance in green buildings that Prof Ghaffarian co-authored, cited 659 times. The papers on green and vernacular architecture echoed the study What can we learn from Malay vernacular houses? published in Sustainable Cities and Society. A chair whose research ran across these questions was able to judge a programme that ranged equally widely, and to give the event a scientific identity rather than a list of sessions.
A Platform for Doctoral Talent
The January 2018 programme shows another dimension of Prof Ghaffarian’s leadership: the use of the series to bring Auckland doctoral research before international peers. Three papers by AUT doctoral candidates under Prof Ghaffarian’s supervision were presented at ALI 2018. Anthony Okakpu’s preliminary study of BIM adoption for refurbishing complex buildings in Auckland opened a line of work that became his 2019 doctorate under Prof Ghaffarian’s primary supervision, and then journal papers including an optimisation process to motivate effective BIM adoption for refurbishment in Frontiers of Architectural Research. Tongrui Zhang presented an electroencephalography based building management system to improve accessibility for disabled users, and a knowledge based system for maintaining building facilities after construction, both related to his 2019 doctorate on integrating BIM with building management systems.
For a doctoral candidate, a peer reviewed and indexed international presentation is an early test of an idea before it reaches a journal. Using the series in that way connected NZAAR to the supervision record that now stands at 21 completed doctorates, and to the AUT research groups from which those candidates came.
A Legacy in Publication
The event published 33 peer reviewed papers across 228 pages, ranging from the relationship between green and vernacular architecture to the effectiveness of BIM in refurbishing complex buildings in Auckland. The proceedings carry ISSN 2463-5960 in print and 2463-5979 online and are indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection as Proceedings Papers of the 4th NZAAR International Event Series. Across its four events the series published 118 papers by more than 250 authors in 749 pages, a record now preserved in full in the GDI Academy archive.
Preservation matters for a series that has closed. The full January 2018 volume and its individual papers remain openly available, so the work presented in Kuala Lumpur continues to be read and cited, and the record of the series is held alongside the GDI conferences that succeeded it. For the authors, many of them early in their careers, that continuity protects the value of their contribution; for Prof Ghaffarian and his co-founders, it keeps the lineage from NZAAR to GDI visible and verifiable.
From Kuala Lumpur to GDI and Back
January 2018 closed the NZAAR series, but not the idea behind it. The themes gathered in Kuala Lumpur were later reorganised into the green, digital and intelligent strands of the GDI conference series, which Prof Ghaffarian founded with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini in 2025. Its inaugural edition in Auckland received more than 200 full papers and delivered more than 180 presentations in ten thematic tracks, governed by 17 international stream leaders and a senior advisory board drawn from 16 countries. The 2026 edition added an Industry Chapter at AUT alongside an online academic conference.
The lineage comes full circle in 2027, when the third GDI edition is planned for Kuala Lumpur in collaboration with CIOB Malaysia. The city where Prof Ghaffarian chaired the final NZAAR event will host the series that succeeded it, now led from AUT and supported by international publishing partners. The line from an independent founding series to an institutional international conference is unusually direct, and the January 2018 event is the hinge of that line: the moment the model proved it could sustain quality and indexing, and the last step before it was rebuilt at larger scale.