Architecture schools must prioritise teaching students net-zero design skills to effectively prepare them for future work, says Anthropocene Architecture School founder Scott McAulay.
Speaking to Dezeen, McAulay said that if the industry is to help alleviate climate change, emerging architects must be taught how to eliminate carbon emissions from the built environment, which is responsible for around 40 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
A failure to do this so far has left a "massive knowledge gap in the industry" in which many architects practice sustainability as a method of damage control, he explained.
Scott McAulay (above) believes architecture students must learn net-zero design skills. He is founder of Anthropocene Architecture School (top) where he teaches climate literacy to architects "We need to have a really frank conversation about the way we've been practising sustainability as a whole, it has become a buzzword and it is effectively just damage control," McAulay told Dezeen.
"At this point, it needs to be entirely normal to start an architecture degree and to be taught in a context of a climate emergency where we have been told that we should be net-zero and curbing carbon emissions as fast as possible," he continued.
"If [the design of a building] is not basically near net-zero, it's already outdated, it's already archaic," he explained. "It's not performing as we know it needs to, so that has to be the est...