The Essence of Architectural Education Personal Explorations and the Characteristics of a Time

The essence of architectural education lies in its teaching of design method,which includes a set of design values,an operational process,the use of design media,and a language system to describe the act of design and its products.Three distinct design methods have been discussed in this paper:the Beaux-Arts method as the core of Chinese architectural education in the past,the space design method of Modern Architecture of ETH-Zurich which we transplanted into the architectural program of Southeast University in the 1990s,and the tectonic method we have been developing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2000.Although these are based on personal experience,they may also partially reflect general characteristics of the development of Chinese architectural education in the past thirty years.