Architecture and engineering : interdisciplinary education

The exact territory of architects and engineers has long been contested, ever since the separate professions emerged out of the industrial revolution. During that era the need for specialist exploration and regulation of the application of scientific knowledge, was fulfilled by the creation of the engineering profession. Engineers’ certainty in describing their roles in designing our built-environment is founded on the seemingly unquestionable necessity of their involvement, to ensure safe and economic designs, through the application of evidence-based research methods. Their design methodology can be seen to be fulfilling their role and evaluating their contribution simultaneously. This contrasts against the intellectual interrogation of different design methods throughout the history of the architectural profession and the challenge faced in demonstrating the value of architectural design.

The expectation of the current architectural and engineering education systems might be that, through their accreditation by the respective professional bodies, they reflect and reinforce professional boundaries. However across all disciplines there is now an increasing requirement for different disciplines to work together on big challenges. Reflecting on such collaborations in all disciplines, recent published work questions whether interdisciplinary research bridges, dissolves or further deepens divisions. Using theories of interdisciplinary research and education this paper compares the accreditation criteria of both the architectural and engineering professional bodies and collates data on interdisciplinary programmes to analyse the division between the two education systems.