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Site analysis and design drawings relating to water issues. (Source: Tyler Jorgenson, Kevin Moore and Andre Rodrigue, B.Arch Graduates 2012).
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For the first time, in history, the majority of human beings live in urban regions. Although cities are among the most complex human-made systems, they are unfortunately environmentally, economically and socially unsustainable. How can we change this? This paper discusses an undergraduate architectural design studio, Future Cities, which pushed for...
Citations
... In recent years, sustainable design has been integrated into academic programs in several institutions around the world (Ismail et al., 2017), with the design studio, as a core element of architectural education, becoming a focal point for such an integration (Salama, 2008;Khalid, 2012). Some notable examples include the Comprehensive Environmental Design (CED) approach at the Dawood College of Engineering and Technology in Karachi, which focuses on the analysis of the micro-urban context as a basis for students' design proposals (Ahmed, 2010); the environmental "Future Cities" studio at the University of Arizona (Susannah, 2013), which adopts a more holistic approach and bridges between the building and the urban scales; and the "gamification" approach applied at MIT, in which students learn how to integrate energy simulation in their design process through a 90-minute hands-on energy simulation "game" (Reinhart et al., 2012). Gamification was also used to promote environmental design at Philadelphia University in the "Survivor Studio", an experimental challenge attempted to actively engage students with sustainability, among other non-design studio curriculum (Rob, 2002). ...
The need to integrate environmental design into the education of architects has been widely recognized in recent years, leading to the development of different pedagogical approaches. While most studies on this challenge are dedicated to the theoretical aspects of creating new pedagogical frameworks, only few examine their implementation in actual student design projects. This paper reports on the integration of environmental concepts in final-year undergraduate student projects at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The design studio followed an iterative approach to the integration of environmental knowledge in design, which meant that the design process progressed through a continuous dialogue between environmental data production and other design considerations. The application of the iterative approach is examined in this paper through four student projects from two consecutive years of teaching, with each case focusing on different stage of the design process. The outcomes of the design studio indicate that the iterative approach has a potential to make environmental design a defining theme in final-year design projects, especially when applied consciously and at well-defined design stages. In addition, the use of quantitative indicators and analytic tools was found to invigorate innovative environmental design strategies. However, preliminary training and theoretical background in environmental design were found to be critical to the students' ability to integrate their body of knowledge effectively and holistically. Based on these outcomes, this paper offers guidelines for future development of environmentally-driven design studios.
