2018 Career Discovery in Architecture – Shanghai Programme

The Career Discovery Program at the Department of Architecture, the University of Hong Kong, aims to give a comprehensive overview of architecture as a university subject and a career path. Given the time frame, it is our primary goal to expose students to all possibilities relating to architecture, and to give them a glimpse on how studying architecture is like at university level.

The program is organized with lectures, workshops, field visits in the morning, and intensive design studio in the afternoon, not unlike the typical curriculum in most architecture schools around the world. Students are presented with a wide range of lectures that aim to enrich their general knowledge as well as to trigger their creative thinking. This year, we conduct both architecture and inter-disciplinary classes and lectures, such as landscape architecture, preservation and conservation, digital design, etc. Students are encouraged to question and investigate the relationships of all these discourses to architecture.

More importantly, students are also required to work on group projects during these three weeks. The aim is to train them to work with people from various backgrounds with different ways of seeing the same problem. By definition, architects today are trained to be professional generalists. They have to understand and work with different disciplines (structural engineers, geo-tech engineers, mechanical/electrical engineers, acoustical engineers, to name a few) in order to put a building together. The program emphasizes the importance of educating our students in working with people.