Two Kent School of Architecture and Planning’s PhD students, Ben Tosland and Rafaella Siagkri are due to present at The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s Architectural History Workshop 2020. This year’s workshop is due to take place at a postponed date, and will take place at The Galley in London. The theme of this year’s workshop is, ‘Beyond the Academy: Architectural History in Heritage, Conservation and Curating’.
Ben Tosland will be presenting with his talk titled, ‘Methodological reflection: problems researching 20th century architecture in the Persian Gulf’. Ben’s doctoral thesis thesis faced numerous methodological challenges which this presentation will discuss, sharing the problems – in some cases unsolved – with researching a region in constant political and economic flux, characterised by cultural, political and economic contrasts. He will discuss the issues surrounding what study material to choose, or which buildings might be necessary, explaining the case studies and architects I chose for my thesis (focusing on Max Lock, Candilis-Josic-Woods, Alfred Roth, Doxiadis Associates and Jørn Utzon), describing their position in the Gulf’s contribution to a picture of a global modernism.
Rafaella Siagkri will be presenting, ‘Virtual Reality as an investigative tool to better understand architecture in historical films’. Her presentation will assess the significance of Virtual Reality (VR) as a reconstruction method. Using 3Ds Max Software to model film sets from the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and using Unreal Software to transfer to Oculus Rift technology will allow the generation of VR simulations to be used in this study. This provides the capability to recreate old, iconic expressionist film sets and to better understand its space.