Sustainable architectural design education: A pilot study in a 3rd year studio

A design studio is the heart and soul of the architectural education curricula where students learn to make repetitive design decisions that result in design strategies for resource use in order to create an environmental system that reacts to the human needs and requirements or solves existing problems. Integrating sustainability principles into the undergraduate design studio is an urgent need in order to teach young architects sustainable design principles that can stop the continued environmental degradation of the planet. This study proposed a new design studio pedagogy for integrating sustainability principles with a method to test the new pedagogy and the students’ final products. This paper presents the tests results of the pilot study and provides recommendations for the experimental design studio of the following semesters