Abstract:

As a global concern, over the last two decades literature talked about the missing link between architectural education and professional practice. With an eye on the built environment as a product of practice, the education preparing for this practice is questioned on the one hand. While on the other hand - the built environment witnesses the loss of integrity of our profession, provoking more questions on architectural education and its credibility.

From this perspective, several writings are dedicated to acknowledge that the architect's fundamental responsibility is an ethical one. It is to create environmentally responsive designs, creating connections between people and aspects of place. This demands a deep understanding of a set of perceptual and analytical abilities pertaining to ecological wisdom and practical means essential to create things that would fit a triplet system of social, economic and environmental attributes.
Such understanding nurture the values that would promote new architectural ethics and consent that a shift towards sustainable thinking in education is urgently needed.

Evenly, it is claimed that sustainability as a concept should become focus and goal of architectural education worldwide. Meanwhile, it has much more to do with the supreme and foremost objectives of design education.

Given the above, practice as actual deeds and education as thought-provoking conceptualizations" is the foundation of this paper. It tackles the relationship between architectural education and practice on the one side, and the relationship between practice and sustainability on the other side. The requirements of practice of conceptualizations and trainings offered by architectural education are questioned. Based on that, a question of how far does our local practice work towards sustainable design is examined.
The paper argues that literal cooperation and participation between academic and practical expertise is essential to incorporate sustainability concepts within the educational process. Given that, integrating sustainable concept in methods of architecture education depends not only on acute understanding of such concepts, and thus presuming educational objectives; but also it relies on linking with the reality of practicing sustainable design within the architecture profession.

For that, the paper is structured in two parts: A content analysis of research tackling sustainability concepts, to elect values governing such concepts, and thus, implicate them in content and methodology of architectural educational programs. Then, a field survey among a number of design bureaus investigated basic mores governing the process of practice. Tools for data gathering employed questioner and structured interviews to examine practitioners’ believes and visions towards issues of sustainability and design education.
In lights of both studies, a deduction of a group of considerations will contribute to the elaboration of a workable approach for teaching design. That, in turn, will indisputably augment the ability of future architects for creating a sustainable architectural and urban product.

Keywords:

Sustainable Thinking, Educational Objectives, Teaching Methodologies.