Renewable energy education in sustainable architecture: lessons from developed and developing countries

Sustainability is a crucial issue for our times and architecture has an important role to play in sustainable development. Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of the total world annual energy consumption. Most of this energy is for the provision of lighting, heating, cooling, and air conditioning as well as the embodied energy of building materials and the energy used in construction. One way of reducing building energy consumption is to educate architects to design buildings, which are powered by renewable forms of energy for heating, lighting, cooling, ventilation and hot water supply. Passive solar design and the minimisation of construction and embodied energy are also important facets of sustainable architecture. Conventional architectural education usually does not cover sustainability or renewable energy issues in its curriculum. These days, renewable energy education has an identity of its own and it addresses the key problems of the modern world. The challenge for architects is to draw on this knowledge and reformulate their curriculum to incorporate these new ideas into their approach to design. Architectural educators need to address the needs of initial training and continuing professional education for professional architects. This is a particularly pertinent issue for developing countries where there is a strong imperative to follow a sustainable development path. This paper will identify the academic obstacles that are impeding the development of sustainable architectural education. These obstacles include: ambiguous definitions of sustainable architecture, confusion over the meaning of sustainability, and lack of experts in this field.