Architectural Learning for a Sustainable Future

“Climate change is so overwhelming, so difficult to understand, and too often represented through technical terms. What is our role as designers (…)”
Aarhus School of Architecture (AAA) is one of two Beaux-Arts based architecture schools in Denmark, with a long tradition for developing sustainable architecture. Currently, the teaching programme ‘emerging sustainable architecture’ offers two undergraduate design units with second and third-year taught together and one master's studio (with a second to open Fall 2020) for fourth and fifth year focussing on architectural responses in the changing climate.
While less explicitly, the school has addressed the topics within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) years before their definition and continues to commit itself to the agenda for a more sustainable future through both architectural research and teaching. Being a Scandinavian institution, this cannot be achieved without a strong focus on conceptual innovation, contextual approaches and a region-specific aesthetic, which favours certain minimalism in its answers to contemporary challenges especially concerning the climate emergency.
Our teaching programme is grounded in contextual design, encouraging plural and holistic approaches to sustainable architecture. Supported by emerging pedagogies which address global and local challenges in society, encouraging a thorough understanding of context as a necessary precondition to conceive and construct spaces for the needs and well-being of people and the environment.