APPRECIATING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH BUILDING SCIENCE EDUCATION.

The subject of sustainability in the built environmental is a complex one and can be viewed from several points of view. However, for the purposes of undergraduate education in architecture, it is common to concentrate on the aspect of reducing energy consumption in buildings. Educators in architecture programs commonly focus on passive systems as the means through which energy can be saved. While these systems can function very well in few environmental conditions, they cannot provide the same comfort level provided by active systems in many other environmental conditions. Hence, students rarely carry into their professional practices what they learned about reducing energy through passive systems. It may make better sense to focus on educating architecture students the fundamentals of building science that cover both passive and active systems and encourage them to build on these fundamentals to reduce energy consumption in the most appropriate way. This paper discusses this later approach as it is applied in the architecture program at the American University of Sharjah. The paper covers the subjects introduced in a building science course that covers the fundamentals of energy performance of buildings. The paper also shows some examples of assignments that use this approach as well as sample of students work