Educational Objectives
Educational Objectives of the Architecture Program
Since the opening of the department of architecture in 1997, the architecture program’s aim has been to produce creative architects who find creative solutions to issues of the times by helping them overcome conventionality and prejudice and by helping them to acquire the skills of free thinking and intuition, based on the ideal of ‘Excellence beyond Compliance.’ Furthermore, the department has established the three objectives and three strategic goals:
A. Basic Objectives: three basic objectives established by the department
1. The Architect as a Professional Volunteer
All areas that are included in architecture continue to be diversified. On the other hand, architecture is subject to the public’s general demand that architecture be explained by universal knowledge. But architecture is extremely specialized. Therefore, the department seeks ‘the ideal of an architect as a professional volunteer.’
2. The Architect as a Creative Artist
The demands of authorities who wish for architecture to comply with the system and those of capitalists who wish for architecture to be assigned to the commercial order are threatening the architectural practice of today. Under these circumstances, the department seeks to carry traditional concepts from the past, to enliven the actual significance of the present, and to seek ‘the ideal of an architect as a creative artist.’
3. The Architect as a Social Designer
The department overcomes specialists who are somewhat limited in architecture, particularly, in architectural design, and seeks ‘the ideal of an architect as a social designer’ or an architect who is always open to new ideas and works as a mediator between theory and practice, culture and engineering, technology and art, tradition and modernity, artificiality and nature, as well as between specialists and the public.
B. Strategic Goals
1. Understanding of the mutual implications between the city and architecture
The department considers both architecture and the city, each of which are clearly distinguished fields in the construction environment, within the integrated area of urban architecture. Rather than the reductive thinking of our environment, the department seeks a totality based on post-modern philosophy. As such, the department seeks comprehensive thought where architecture and the city share meaning.
2. Understanding a sustainable environment
One of the greatest issues that humanity faces in the 21st century is to sustain life by coping with a shortage of resources, climate change, and pollution. Thus architecture’s strategies for coping with these issues have become more and more important in architectural education. The department seeks to offer its program based on a new scientific paradigm with renewed understanding of the environment of the Earth as whole, complex scientific systems in science, and ecological thought based on the traditional values of East Asia.
3. Understanding of globalization and localization
Today’s era shows greater integration of the world, and at the same time, a movement that shows marked differences among regions. Architectural practice is also required to have universal thinking that the world shares and the specific thinking that reflect the attributes of each region. Therefore, the department seeks to acquire wider and deeper insight that can combine the global and the local, the universal and the specific from a diverse range of categories.