Education for Sustainable Architecture in Asian Countries

The architectural education is a key factor in the re-thinking of the whole industry towards a system of more sustainable buildings and cities. While in the professional world the development of green assessment tools and new professional fields of specialization are a fact, the schools of architecture at undergraduate level have still to struggle to fit a new field of knowledge within an established academic tradition balanced towards design and aesthetics. Even though the sustainable city movement requests a global effort, regional idiosyncrasies call for local specific approaches to the problem, and generates regionally applicable solutions pulling from local wisdom, knowledge and experience taking climate, culture, resources and technology into account. Especially, Asia is urbanizing with high-density systems more rapidly than any other area in the world, a fact that demonstrates a substantial difference with the West. It is necessary to educate professionals who have well balanced and integrated knowledge of local issues and global standards. However, in many researches, the cases of the US and Europe are highlighted and discussed as the leading stream. Therefore this paper focuses on the education for sustainable architecture in Asian countries, especially China, Hong-Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore. The study is exploratory, digging into the curricula of selected influential schools, comparing them in regards of their methods and degrees of implementation of sustainability education, particularly focusing on philosophy, system, curriculums and cooperation of interdisciplinary expertise. Furthermore similarities and differences with the West are investigated. The results are very heterogeneous, ranging from little more than individual professors inclusion of sustainability issues in their individual courses, to more organized plans. However we are far from finding a final perfect system, the This paper study finds useful references and suggests ways of integrating the spare solutions researched into a more complete approach, with further study and effort still necessary to update the current systems, to make them more efficient and realistic, while keeping the personality and uniqueness of each urban culture and school.