In Search of Architectural Engineering Education in South Asia

Abstract Architecture is the art and science of designing and erecting buildings. Architecture precedes architectural engineering by centuries in existence and leans more toward being an art than a science, although one must have knowledge of construction methods and materials to work successfully. Architectural engineering combines all aspects of the building design and construction, involving mechanical, electrical and structural and other notions of mathematical precision. It is a field that uses far more technology than its predecessor. Architecture focuses more on the aesthetic design and the functional and spatial layout of buildings as opposed to the engineering that architectural engineering incorporates. Architectural engineers apply engineering principles to the construction, planning and design of buildings and other structures. Architecture has been closely associated with engineering in the history of the building construction. The engineering for buildings was determined empirically in the early periods; later, scientific calculations for structures were developed in the 17th century, and engineering was taught as a separate course in the 18th century. Architectural Engineering was established as a discipline in the formal realm of engineering in United States in the late 19th century when the University of Illinois became the first of many universities to offer an architectural engineering program.1 The university with the longest ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc.) accreditation is Pennsylvania State University, which received theirs in 1935 In South Asia the Sir J.J School of Architecture (originally called the Government College of Art) in Bombay was the first modern school to introduce a structured course in architecture. In its initial years the one architectural event to capture the imagination of the profession was the building of the Capital city of New Delhi by Lutyens. Many of the faculty, such as Claude Batley, while intellectually sympathetic to the need for an Indian identity but were grounded in the nineteenth century European Beaux Arts tradition. A thorough grounding in the art and craft of construction was always held to be a prerequisite for architectural training. This was reflected in the fact that the Bombay school had a strong technical component and all the schools that followed it, such as the Bengal Engineering College at Calcutta, Baroda's Kalabhavan, Delhi's Polytechnic, were primarily technical institutions with a department of architecture. Engineering and construction courses took up the lion's share of the curriculum. This paper intends to explore the current state-of-the-art of architectural engineering education in south Asia.