Architectural Education in 21st Century Asia: How to Learn Architecture

As Asia heads into the new 21st Century era a new architecture is called for. It needs now to think of a future in which social justice, cultural justice and environmental justice are fully reflected in its buildings and human settlement designs. Towards these ends, new thinking must emerge in our architecture schools and in the new graduates they educate.New Asian architects must be able of finding new design languages, expressions, new geometries within new working methods capable of engaging in trans-disciplinary discourses and be able to inspire the masses of people at all levels of society to the new future Asia will lead globally. To do this, this book advocates and calls attention to learning basic skills lost in the context of rapid urbanisation and distortions caused to deep Asian civilizational values. In this process, the fostering of relevant attitudes through empowering our Asian architecture students is of the utmost importance. There are many examples of such empowerment in this book.The new pedagogy will challenge tutors as it will students as our architecture schools join in the quest for the new Asian architect and the new Asian architecture. The starting point is through understanding the special learning situations peculiar to our Asian students in the particular context of Asia's rapid modernization.