The Impact of Integration between the Theoretical and Practical Side of Sustainability Teaching in Architecture Departments

Abstract

Today the world is facing great environmental problems. The built environment with its sick architectural designs has a major contribution in these problems, and it becomes clear that architects play a key role to overcome these problems or minimize their affect by taking sound sustainable measures in architectural designs. This makes teaching sustainability in higher education one of the most important tools to raise student's environment awareness, especially in architecture departments. Here appears the general research problem regarding the need to include sustainability teaching in architecture departments as an essential part of its curriculum starting from the early years of study, besides identifying the best methods to combine this subject with the existing ones, here appears the specific research problem considering the existing separation between the theoretical sustainability teaching and it's practical application in architectural design. That caused missing sustainable principles in students design. The hypothesis refers that adding sustainability as an important part of the curriculum in architecture departments from the early years of study have a great effect in changing students thoughts to shift towards sustainable designs, besides the integrating the theoretical part of teaching sustainability in classroom with its practical side in design studios. This will promote achieving the aimed goals of teaching this subject, and deeper student's knowledge about it.

Keywords: sustainable teaching, theoretical and practical teaching in architecture departments.