Architecture Program Accreditation: A Pathway to Graduates International Mobility

• Main Authors: Sawsan Saridar Masri, Hisham Arnaouty
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2015-01-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Architecture
• Online Access: http://www.atiner.gr/journals/architecture/2015-1-1-5-Masri.pdf

The education of architects as global professionals has been one of the priority goals of the Faculty of Architectural Engineering (FAE) at the Beirut Arab University for many years. It is believed that practice and education are interdependent elements of the profession that, when integrated, enable students, educators, and practitioners to obtain and maintain the knowledge and skills needed to enter and fully participate in the profession, and to achieve design excellence in service to the globalized community. Therefore, the FAE has developed its curriculum in a positive manner to integrating of education of architecture into practice, meeting the continuing challenges in the era of globalization. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the program using the validation criteria of several architecture accreditation boards. The main prospect of evaluation is that to achieve a satisfactory balance between theory and practice which implies that the study program addresses the fact that architects cannot limit themselves to conceptual analysis or virtual projects, nor to local and regional practice of the profession. Instead, graduates have the opportunity to reside their education at the crossroads between human, social, and cultural values and the technical capacities of construction of the global world.