- Assistant Professor
- Architecture, Interior Design
- Director, Trimble Technology Lab
Biography
Vahid Vahdat is an assistant professor of architecture and interior design at WSU’s School of Design and Construction. His primary field of research is spatial mediation, with an emphasis on virtual reality and film. He is the author of “Occidentalist Perceptions of European Architecture in Nineteenth Century Persian Travel Diaries—Travels in Farangi Space.” The book has been commended by reviewers for its “compelling and convincing interpretations […] grounded in archival and architectural evidence.”
Dr. Vahdat’s interest in the agency of architectural media extends to his studios, where he takes advantage of the freedom and abstraction that virtual reality offers to encourage utopian speculations of space. His three volume, “Virtual Interiorities” (Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press, 2022), addresses how virtual media frame, filter, and manipulate our perception of the built environment.
He is also the co-editor of “Architecture, Film, and the In-Between: Spatio-Cinematic Betwixt” (Intellect, 2023), which investigates the filmic imagination/representation of architectural in-betweenness as well as the in-between spaces within the inherent architectural structure of filmic expression. His “A Purple Architecture: Design in the Age of the Physical-Virtual Continuum” (Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press, 2023) is a collection of essays and projects investigating the impacts of technological mediation in blending the spectrums of reality.
His latest edited book, “Animate(d) Architecture: A Spatial Investigation of the Moving Image” (Liverpool University Press, 2024), is an interdisciplinary examination of animation from a spatial lens.
Dr. Vahdat has held academic positions in the US and abroad, including at the University of Houston and Texas A&M University. He joined the SDC faculty at Washington State University in 2019. He is the director of WSU’s Trimble Technology Lab.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture, Texas A&M University.
Master of Urban Design, University of Tehran.
Bachelor of Architecture, Yazd University.