Environmental Design in University Curricula and Architectural Training in Europe (EDUCATE)

The promotion of sustainability in the design of the built environment is a key-factor for addressing the challenges mankind faces in response to finite resource availability, environmental deterioration and climate change. Buildings are accounted nowadays for around half of worldwide energy consumptions, significantly contributing to global warming and the alteration of natural ecosystems. In such context - and in consideration of the growing ecological/energy awareness required by new regulations in the construction sector (e.g. the European Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings) - the role of higher education as a means of comprehensively introducing new generations of architects to the principles and practices of sustainable environmental design is becoming highly significant, although this faces a number of pedagogical and professional barriers. The need to initiate a change in the training of building practitioners that supports the successful implementation of environmental considerations in the practice of architecture - including issues of climatic design, choice of materials, construction techniques, passive and hybrid strategies, resource efficiency, reduction of impacts, etc. - is mainly triggered by three factors:

Main objectives are:

Throughout its 36 months of duration, EDUCATE will build on existing synergies between participating institutions and draw from parallel experiences currently undertaken worldwide. The project will primarily consolidate the international state-of the-art of curricular structures and professional requirements at a global level, conducting an exhaustive analysis of the state of play in terms of environmental education at university level and of the requirements for professional qualification as established by competent bodies in the various countries considered. This task will include an overview of education literature and contemporary pedagogical theories and practices. In addition, partners will ascertain the level of knowledge and requirements of environmental design within architectural firms, so as to identify strengths and weaknesses of existing pedagogical methods, extrapolate examples of best practices and define an agenda for sustainable architectural education that responds to the demand of enhancing environmental design in buildings. Successively, the work will concentrate on the development of a flexible pedagogical framework enabling the adoption of principles of environmental sustainability at different levels of education. Inter-, intra- and extra-disciplinary contributions to a restructured pedagogy will be explored (also drawing from cognate disciplines), together with the appraisal of applied/experiential learning, new pedagogical tools, e-learning, etc. Concurrently, in collaboration with professional bodies, partners will benchmark the requirements of the professional market and identify pedagogical objectives and competence of environmental sustainability requested at the various stages of architectural training. Combining these activities with the creation of a broad knowledge-base of environmental design, the project will propose a curriculum enabling the successful incorporation of principles of sustainable design at every stage of progression towards professional qualification. The curriculum will be constructed in accordance with the Bologna structure of higher education, thus embedding relevant principles of environmental sustainability across 3-year undergraduate, 2-year graduate and 1 year postgraduate education, and within Continuing Professional Development. The outcomes of this stage of work will be tested at participating institutions during the subsequent phase of the project, to measure the success of the pedagogy devised. Partners will exploit an interactive portal on sustainable environmental design to consolidate information and facilitate exchange of know-how and remote collaboration amongst staff and students, whilst external professionals will be involved in interactive education. In the following phase, the partners will appraise and validate the results obtained in terms of learning outcomes and achieved educational objectives. The developed pedagogy will be compared with the state-of-the-art of higher education so as to facilitate the adaptation of the curriculum to different backgrounds, cultural contexts, teaching approaches and environmental targets and will be disseminated to educators and academic institutions in Europe and globally. Finally, a set of conditions for accreditation of academic curricula and criteria for professional qualification to be implemented by regulatory bodies will be proposed, establishing the level of knowledge and ability in sustainable environmental design expected of graduates at every level of their education. These criteria will have a prescriptive nature, but will still allow some flexibility for them to be potentially embraced by regulatory bodies in different countries.

Higlighted results are:

EDUCATE will provide a ground-breaking platform for implementing sustainable design as a creative factor in the education and practice of architecture, with significant impacts on the quality of the built environment. Such platform will strongly contribute to the development of innovative pedagogical methods in the training of professionals and will promote increased homogenisation, exchanges and reinforced cooperation throughout academic and professional institutions in Europe This will contribute to the enhancement of the “European Higher Education Area”, one of the main objectives of the Bologna process seeking to create a more comparable, compatible and coherent system of higher education in Europe.