Designing to meet Human Needs: Place of Environment-Behaviour Studies in Architectural Education

The role of architecture is to create spaces that meet the needs of users. Architecture of buildings is influenced by many factors such as behavioural, socio-cultural and physical which affect the design, meaning and use of space to different individuals and group of people. In view of this, some courses that deal with man-environment behaviour studies were incorporated into the curriculum of architecture schools, but it has been observed that the guiding principles of the curriculum formulation and implementation of these courses are yet to establish institutional ideology; to enforce the context relevance, and implementation in the instructional plans so that architects under tutelage can create environments that will respond to the need of users. Using secondary data from literature and curricula of four architectural schools in South-west Nigeria, this paper examines how adequately students are sensitize on the relationship between man and environment as an important way of meeting his needs. It was discovered that aspects of Environment-Behaviour studies were rarely incorporated into the curricula of the schools investigated. This paper recommended that curriculum review be done parametrically in favour of EBR pedagogic dynamics