Integrated Design, Architecture and Sustainability
© 2016 LAST
At the occasion of the recent Graduation Day at the l’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), six graduate students obtained an interdisciplinary Minor in Integrated design, Architecture and Sustainability (IDEAS). The IDEAS Minor, initiated and piloted jointly by the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Performance-Integrated Design (LIPID), aims at reinforcing the integration of sustainability and interdisciplinarity issues in the Master Cycle of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC).
Sustainability issues occupy central stage in the questions related to built environment. Considering the increased awareness of environmental stakes and increased building performance, these aspects will become more and more important in research and practical work related to architecture and building engineering.
To meet these multiple challenges, architectural, civil and environmental engineering studies are characterized by the increased integration of sustainability issues. This development is already observed in the existing EPFL course offering. The new IDEAS Minor aims at structuring this existing offer in a targeted orientation for the ENAC students, in order to make it transparent and explicit, and to guide them towards a rich and coherent knowledge. The objective is also to prepare second cycle students more explicitly for a doctoral work within the IDEAS program of the Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City (EDAR).
The central thread of this orientation is based on a in-depth approach of sustainable architecture and construction principles, which rely on the simultaneous integration of various parameters: efficient use of resources, optimal user comfort mainly through passive means, bioclimatic specificities and, more generally, optimization of environmental, socio-cultural and economic criteria.
The Minor is built around a list of 27 classes spread over both semesters. They are selected from the existing course offering. This selection offers a combination of theory classes – focusing on comfort, energy, environment and infrastructures - and project-oriented classes. In order to obtain the Minor, 30 credits ECTS have to be validated from this list of courses throughout the duration of the Master.
Among the six graduate students who obtained the IDEAS Minor in 2016, Jessica Ruffieux and Axelle Marchon were registered in the Architecture section (SAR), Geoffroy Meunier and Ilham Errougani in the Civil Engineering section (SGC) and Nathalie Dumas and Juliette Bouclon in the Environmental Sciences and Engineering section (SIE).