Review on integrating sustainability knowledge into architectural education: Practice in the UK and the USA

The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development steered by The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) since 2005 ended in 2014. It looked into the integration principles, values and practices of sustainable development in all aspects of education and learning, with the intention of addressing the global social, economic, cultural and environmental issues in the 21st century. It has become an essential issue in architectural education to create awareness among future generations of architects to be more sensitive towards the environmental impact of architecture on human behavior. This encouraged every school of architecture to incorporate sustainability knowledge into its curriculum and promote 'sustainable architectural education', leading to the questions of: what type of structural model of integration approach being applied in promoting architectural sustainable education? The objectives of this paper are to investigate the type of structural models that have been applied in architectural curriculum in selected schools of architecture in both countries and evaluate the level of-emphasis in incorporating sustainability knowledge in the curriculum. Therefore, this-paper reviewed the approach of integration principles, values and practices of sustainable development at 10 conveniently sampled architecture schools in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA). Data was collected from their respective web sites and their concepts of integration were reviewed and the distribution of credit hours revealed to determine the level of emphasis considered. Findings showed various paths taken by the different institutions in integrating the knowledge of sustainability into their architectural curriculum. This paper concludes with recommendations for further research into gauging the effectiveness of architectural curricula with integrated sustainability knowledge. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.