Abstract:

Sustainable development has become in the past decades the main topic of political and academic discourse at global level. Addressing sustainable development involves a paradigm shift and an overall change in scientific research and higher education, because it requires the integration of environmental, social, economic and cultural dimensions at different scales, from global to local and individual.

So far it appears that interdisciplinary research in the field of sustainable development Eastern European countries and Romania is still at an early stage because of the difficulty to generate a real dialogue between various specialists. In architectural Higher Education and research sustainability is understood by most of the students in technical and ecological terms. A previous study of the author revealed that the same is true for most of the architects in the region. Being aware that the future sustainability of buildings depends on how the way young generation perceive it and tries to find solutions, the present article presents an alternative approach for architecture students.

A part of the aesthetics course (in the first semester from the fifth year of study) and also sustainability course (in the second semester of the fifth year of study) treat this issue as a query field, with specific questions, presenting different approaches, in order to change student’s perspective on this issue. The present article presents this pluralist approach, providing at the same time a literature review of this sensitive subject.

Starting from an article published in 2001 in Journal of Architectural Education (pp.140-148), “Reinterpreting Sustainable Architecture: The Place of Technology” by S.Guy and G.Farmer (that relates the image of space, the source of environmental knowledge, the building image, technologies and the idealized concept of place in order to define what the authors define six types of competing "logics" of sustainable architecture) and from the 4 pillars included in most building sustainability assessment (ecological, social, economic and cultural) in the aesthetics a framework of sustainability analysis different from the BSA systems is provided in order to understand these connections and to find the most fitted approaches for each student, depending on how they see their future career.

In the second semester, at the sustainability of building seminar one paper is dedicated to how they can improve a project they have previously done in the third or the fourth year of study in terms of approaches considered more appropriate. The students have to work on the basis of two from the six choices and the specific approaches from those two "eco-logic".

While “invisible green” (related mainly to data and the engineering parts) became the main issue in architecture in the past decade, what can be called “the visible green” can have a bigger impact. As a conclusion, future architects should understand that elementary decisions related to form, image, relationships, integration and aesthetics are crucial for a sustainable building.

Keywords:

Architectural education, interdisciplinary research, sustainable architecture, aesthetics, technology.