Reflecting on the architecture curriculum through a survey on career switching

Abstract

Architectural education in China was a contributor to the super-fast urbanization process during the past 20 years. However, due to the economy bubble in the construction industry, many real-estate companies started transferring investments to other fields. This lead to the shrinkage of the architecture design market and the decrease of architects’ salary. A great number of architects switched careers to maintain the same living quality as before. Meanwhile, architectural education in China is not able to integrate itself with emerging science and technologies, losing the possibilities to explore new employment channels for its graduates. An online survey is conducted to investigate the current state of architects shifting their careers, trying to analyse the feedback and exposure to the existing problems. In the second part of this paper, education curriculum from three top universities is scrutinized and the education boundary is reconstructed from three aspects: integrating the emerging technologies into the architectural curriculum; reducing unnecessary content from the teaching program; training the ability to learn.