MArch Unit 1 visited Milan during Enhancement Week at the end of October, on a field trip led by Dr Manolo Guerci and Peter Buš. During their visit, they explored numerous buildings and sites covering Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, 18th and 19th century and modernism. Interested in finding out more about their trip? Watch MArch Stage 5 student Andy Kong’s great short film.
Dr Peter Buš, Lecturer in Digital Architecture and member of DARC Research Centre, will be visiting Taiwan later this month to give a lecture at the National United University in Miao-Li. His lecture titled, ‘Transforming architecture in the age of digitisation of construction: participation, automation and evolving responsive concepts for the 21st Century’, conceptually outlines the idea of crowd-driven assemblies for flexible and adaptive constructions utilising automatic technologies in the context of twenty-first century cities.
The presentation will also look at the results from Peter’s Richard Rogers Fellowship residency in London conducted last Spring dedicated to large-scale urban prototyping for responsive cities. Peter argues that building technology needs to incorporate human inputs following the aspects of customisation to build adaptive architectural and urban scenarios based on immediate decisions made according to local conditions or specific spatial demands. The presentation will focus on large-scale automatic prototyping for built applications at the theoretical level along with interactions between humans and automatic building technologies.
Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou recently attended the fifth Asia-Pacific Energy Sustainable Development Forum, for the fifth anniversary celebration event of APSEC, held in Tianjin on 18-20 September. The forum was organised by APEC Sustainable Energy Centre under the guidance of Tianjin University and National Energy Administration China.
Professor Nikolopoulou presented the recent work on the Urban Albedo project, with a talk titled, ‘Developing an urban albedo calculator: an empirical model to predict changes in relation to urban fabric and solar altitude in London’. Urban albedo, the capacity of urban surfaces to reflect solar radiation, is one of the most important contributors to changes in outdoor temperature, intensifying the urban heat island phenomenon, where temperatures in urban centres are higher than the surrounding rural environs.
In addition to attending the conference in Tianjin, Professor Nikolopoulou also represented the University of Kent at the EIC Fair in Tianjin, and visited schools and agents in Beijing as part of her trip to China.
Senior Lecturer and CASE (Centre for Architecture and the Sustainable Environment) director, Dr Giridharan Renganathan, was invited to speak to the staff at the Faculty of Architecture, Karpagam University, Coimbatore, India.
His presentation titled, 
‘Experimental approach to urban albedo calculation: methodological challenges’, outlined the ongoing EPSRC funded Urban Albedo research project at the Kent School of Architecture and Planning, and discussed challenges related to surveying and scaling, experimental model building, sourcing and installation of equipment, development of digital model, validation of digital model.
The presentation focused on measures taken within budgetary constraints to overcome the challenges and its implications. Dr Renganathan also discussed the challenges in integrating passive strategies in the context of climate change with undergraduate and postgraduate students.
In addition to the presentation at Karpagam University, Dr Giridharan Renganathan was also invited to deliver a lecture to postgraduate students and staff and the Department of Architecture, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India. The lecture titled, ‘Building resilience to overheating: a case study of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge’, discussed the proposed advanced adaptive refurbishment options and their relative performance predicted against the existing internal conditions, energy demands and carbon dioxide emissions. The lecture highlighted that this may have more resilience in the current climate than expected, and that it will remain resilient into the 2030s. However, beyond 2050 some form of mechanical cooling may be needed. Dr Renganathan also highlighted that the problem could be more complex in hot and humid conditions such as in India, and the importance of developing context specific performance database for soft-landing measures.
Senior Lecturer and CASE director Giridharan Renganathan was invited to deliver a lecture to postgraduate students and staff at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. The lecture titled, ‘Research Methods for Performance Analysis’ discussed categorisation of research with a specific focus on architecture, premises and characterisation of qualitative and quantitative research, and research design with a focus on case study.
Dr Renganathan used examples from his research work on hospital performance studies in UK, urban heat island studies in Hong Kong and urban albedo studies for high latitude locations to highlight the methods and techniques, with a specific focus on surveying, monitoring, modelling, statistical analysis and experimental process. The talk concluded by highlighting the limitation of these techniques and possible way forward.
The International Seminar on Courtyard Performance and Thermal Modeling at the University of Seville focused on the results from a recent project on the environmental performance of courtyards, involving detailed monitoring, mathematical modelling, dynamic thermal simulations and energy analysis. The seminar, which was held at the School of Architecture of Seville, involved collaborations with researchers from the groups of Thermal Technology, Mathematical Modeling, and Simulation of Environmental Systems, Material Technology and Building Systems, as well as the Universities of Cadiz, Harvard and Kent.
Professor Marialena Nikolopoulou, Deputy Head of School, and founder of the Centre of Architecture and Sustainable Environment, gave a keynote presentation, in what marked the beginning of a new collaboration with Kent School of Architecture and Planning in the context of a new project on the role of courtyards in contemporary architecture.
Dr Tim Ireland, Kent School of Architecture and Planning’s Director of Digital Architecture, will be presenting his recently published paper entitled, ‘The Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information‘, at the 2019 Annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Moscow in July.
The presentation, co-authored with Dr Jaime Cardenas-Garcia (University of Maryland) is entitled, A New Biosemiotics Paradigm: Bateson Information. Biosemiotics integrates theoretical biology with semiotics, a science on signification and meaning.
The concept of information has been extensively studied and written about, yet no consensus on a unified definition of information has to date been reached. The paper seeks to establish a unified definition of information and claims a biosemiotics perspective, based on Gregory Bateson’s definition of information, and provides a footing on which to build because the frame this provides has applicability to both the sciences and humanities.
A key issue in reaching a singular definition of information is the problem of identifying how a human organism develops from a state in which its knowledge of the human-organism-in-its-environment is almost non-existent, to a state in which the human organism not only recognises the existence of the environment but also sees itself as part of the human-organism-in-its-environment system. This allows a human organism not only to engage with the environment and navigate through it, but also to transform it in its own image and likeness. In other words, the Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information concerns the phylogenetic development process, as well as the ontogenetic development process of Homo sapiens, from a single cell to our current multicellular selves, all in a changing long-term and short-term environment, respectively.
Dr. Nikolaos Karydis has been invited by the Faculty of History of the University of Warsaw to present his recent reconstruction of the lost church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople. This was one of the most influential Byzantine churches. Its use as a model for the church of San Marco in Venice has been well documented. However, we know very little about the origins of the church of the Holy Apostles itself. This is largely due to the fact that this church no longer exists and its form has mainly been studied through Middle Byzantine descriptions. Based on a new interpretation of these records, Karydis’ recent visualisation of the church of the Holy Apostles provides a new base for investigating its origins. The key to establishing these origins lies in the comparison of Justinian ‘Apostoleion’ with the coeval church of St. John at Ephesos. This comparison sheds light on the stream of architectural influences between Constantinople and the provinces. It also helps to gain a better sense of the development of the type of the cruciform domed basilica during the first half of the sixth century.
The lecture is part of the Faculty of History’s ‘Late Antique Seminar’ and is intended to open the conference ‘Clerics in Church and Society’. Further information about the event can be found in here.
Howard Griffin, Director of the MA Architectural Visualisation programme, was invited to speak about his research into projection mapping at the Lyon Light Festival Forum in December. The forum, which takes place as part of the annual Fête des Lumières, widely regarded as the inaugural and most famous light festival in the world, was attended by academics, lighting designers, projection artists and festival organisers. Building on a recent article co-written with Dr Jane Lovell of Canterbury Christ Church University, Howard argued about the importance of understanding the nature of different projected installations and the effect this can have on their evaluation. The article can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2018.1556674
The presentation coincided with the University of Kent becoming an associate member of LUCI (Lighting Urban Communities International), a network of cities and companies focused on urban lighting and festivals. Howard is working with stakeholder and partners to develop plans for a Light Festival in Canterbury in the near future.
The MA Architectural Visualisation course’s ‘Architectural Photography’ module taught us the fundamental principles of photographic creation and processing. Through this module, we were able to attain a comprehensive knowledge of light, exposure and color, and their application in architectural photography. The result is that we are now able to choose a photographic composition that maintains a balance of all the key parameters.
As part of the MA Architectural Visualisation programme, we had the opportunity to participate in the WEDO exhibition in the Athens School of Fine Arts with a selection of our digital and analogue photographs. WEDO team presents the collective art project GIVING, based on an idea of Panagiotis Siagreece and Athanasios Bathas, organized and curated by Maira Stefou and with the participation of 218 artists. The project was presented as a parallel event of the Platforms Project, at the Former Libary of the Athens School of Fine Arts, Piraeus 256, 17-20 May 2018.
CONCEPT: The universe is a unified unit consisting of the same material, governed by common rules and communicating energetically and dynamically. The lack of awareness of this treaty by man has led him to social individualism and psychic isolation. The philosophy of “I” instead of “we” invalidates the possibility of individual happiness that can only be achieved through the happiness of the whole of which the individual is an integral part. In an effort to comment on the above, we artists-individuals are united in a group, creating a collective unified work that we offer to the public, as a deposit of time (10 days) and as a product of this deposit, wanting to symbolically contribute in the union of the whole, reacting to the social and cultural collapse, catalyzing the classical elitist relationship between the artist and spectator and abolishing the restrictive economic transaction. Coexistence and co creation implies an action with artistic diversity and with the integration of identity as a difference (personal, style, name-anonymity, age) in a context of a shared aim, elements that are not common practice in group art events.
PROJECT: Each artist participates with 10 artworks 25cm x 25cm that have been attached to 25cm x 25cm styrofoam cubes, forming a single installation. Each cube includes works of different artists. During the project’s exhibition, a sum of money will be collected from those who receive works and from the public, which will be offered to the Center for the Training and Rehabilitation of the Blind.
