UNESCO-UIA Architectural Education Commission

Commission Activities and Outputs 2023–2026

The 2023–2026 Commission translated its mandate into a coherent, interconnected programme of six activities.

• Webinar Series — Global Visions for Architectural Education. Five international webinars were convened between June 2024 and February 2026, engaging more than thirty speakers from twenty countries across all five UIA regions. Moderated by the co-directors, the series examined pedagogy, practice, and policy; emerging global trends; alignment with allied built-environment disciplines; the relationship between research, pedagogy, and practice; and the expanding civic and ethical role of the architect.

• Global Survey of Schools of Architecture. The most comprehensive global assessment of architectural education undertaken to date, the survey analysed 345 accredited architecture programmes across 159 countries and all five UIA regions, conducted between March and June 2025. It mapped how schools are responding to the converging priorities of climate change, technological transformation, social equity, and the evolving role of the architect. The work involved the effort of a commissioned researcher Dr Madhavi Patil to work with the Co-Directors.

• Pilot Survey of Architectural Education Systems. A comparative pilot study was conducted across seventeen countries spanning all five UIA regions, completed in August 2024. It established the methodology and evidence base for the subsequent global survey, examining how schools structure programmes, prepare graduates, integrate contemporary challenges, and maintain standards through accreditation.

• UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education — Third Edition. Conceived by Ashraf Salama and established in 2019 under the auspices of EDUCOM, the Award reached its largest scale in its third edition: 32 shortlisted entries from 22 countries across all five UIA regions, drawn from more than 70 registrations. Five entries were awarded and four commended, with the awards ceremony held at the Barcelona Congress on 2 July 2026.

• UNESCO-UIA Charter for Architectural Education — Review and Update. The Commission undertook a targeted revision of the Charter, the principal normative framework for architectural education internationally. Building on the comprehensive 2023 update, the 2026 revision introduced a new Preamble framing architecture as a practice of regenerative justice, new guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in pedagogy and practice, and a formalised description of the Charter's triennial and sexennial update cycle. The revised Charter was approved by the UIA Council on 21 April 2026 and ratified by the General Assembly at the Barcelona Congress in July 2026.

• Representation and Engagement. Beyond the core programme, the Commission represented the UIA at the EAAE Annual Conference on Transhistorical Pedagogies (August 2025), at the First NEB Academy Conference in Barcelona (February 2026), and at the joint UIA–Mauritanian Order of Architects Strategic Reflection Workshop for the launch of Mauritania's first National School of Architecture (April 2026).

Webinar Series

Global Visions: Architectural Education and the Role of the Architect in the 21st Century

Between June 2024 and March 2026, Ashraf Salama and Selma Harrington co-directed a series of five international webinars under the banner Global Visions: Architectural Education and the Role of the Architect in the 21st Century. Moderated throughout by the co-directors, the series brought together more than thirty speakers from twenty-five countries across all five UIA regions, engaging over four hundred registered participants in a global dialogue about the purpose, shape, and responsibilities of architectural education today. The accumulated evidence from the series is unambiguous: the traditional model of the architect as a technically proficient, aesthetically sovereign designer is no longer adequate. Each webinar built on the last, tracing a cumulative argument for fundamental reorientation rather than adjustment at the margins.

The full proceedings of the series are developed as a standalone EDUCOM report: Global Visions: Architectural Education and the Role of the Architect in the 21st Century (UIA Architectural Education Commission, 2026). The report will be available in August 2026, following the World Congress of Architects in Barcelona, June 2026.

Webinar 1 — Architectural Education and the Role of the Architect in the 21st Century: Pedagogy | Practice | Policy (27 June 2024). Eleven speakers from all five UIA regions opened the series with a shared diagnosis: climate change, social inequality, digital disruption, and the erosion of the architect's role within the construction industry demand a new kind of education. Discussions ranged from circular economy principles and AI in the studio to cultural context, indoor health environments, and the development of citizen architects capable of engaging with complex societal challenges. [Part 1] [Part 2] 

https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/news/architectural-education-and-the-role-of-the-architect-in-the-21st-century/

Webinar 2 — Emerging Global Trends in Architectural Pedagogy (23 January 2025). Three speakers examined concrete directions for curriculum reform, including radicant design, decolonised pedagogies, and co-creation skills. What united these approaches was a shared rejection of imposed, Eurocentric templates and a commitment to contextually embedded, community-oriented learning.

https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/news/emerging-global-trends-in-architectural-education/

Webinar 3 — Aligning Architecture Education Across Allied Built-Environment Disciplines (27 June 2025). Four speakers, including representatives of IFLA and ISOCARP, made the case that architecture alone cannot address the interconnected challenges of climate change, urban inequality, and public health. Meaningful education must integrate landscape architecture, urban planning, interior design, and engineering within genuinely transdisciplinary frameworks. 

https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/news/uia-educom-webinar-aligning-architectural-education-across-allied-built-environment-disciplines/

Webinar 4 — Connecting Research, Pedagogy, and Practice (27 November 2025). Three speakers addressed the relationship between research, pedagogy, and practice, arguing that the studio must become a site of genuine inquiry. Circular pedagogy, practice-based research, and critical engagement with the spatial dimensions of the Anthropocene each offered pathways toward a more transformative design education.

https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/news/uia-architectural-education-commission-4th-international-live-webinar/

Webinar 5 — Socially Engaged Pedagogies: The Architect as Listener, Mediator, Collaborator, Civic Agent, and Critical Practitioner (5 March 2026). Five speakers brought the series to a close by examining community design, design-build, and live project models that position learning within lived contexts. The webinar argued that the architect's expanded social role is not an aspiration but a necessity — one that demands educational systems willing to centre the human and the communal at the heart of studio culture.

https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/news/uia-educom-webinar-socially-engaged-pedagogies/ 

Global Survey of Schools of Architecture: Trends and Patterns

The Global Survey of Schools of Architecture is the most comprehensive global assessment of architectural education undertaken to date. Commissioned by EDUCOM and conducted by Ashraf Salama, Selma Harrington, and Madhavi P. Patil (Northumbria University) between March and June 2025, it analyses 345 accredited architecture programmes across 159 countries and all five UIA regions. Drawing on a nine-dimensional analytical framework and ten cross-cutting thematic lenses, the survey maps how schools are responding to the converging priorities of climate change, technological transformation, social equity, and the evolving role of the architect. Its findings are intended to inform curriculum reform, accreditation policy, and the strategic priorities of the UIA and its member organisations worldwide.

The nine dimensions cover programme and curriculum structure, accreditation and quality assurance, faculty profiles, student outcomes, facilities and resources, pedagogical approaches and assessment, industry and community engagement, sustainability and social responsibility, and internationalisation. The ten thematic lenses, drawn from the webinar series, examine health and well-being, transdisciplinary curricula, decolonised pedagogy, SDG integration, AI-driven transformation, allied disciplines, practice-informed pedagogy, emerging pedagogies, policy literacy, and the evolving role of the architect.

The headline findings reveal both remarkable progress and persistent gaps. Near-universal integration of allied disciplines (99%), substantial SDG alignment (88%), and widespread embedding of sustainability (over 90%) mark a genuine global commitment to the expanded responsibilities of the profession. At the same time, decolonised pedagogies appear in only 29% of programmes, health-focused design in just 22%, and only 31% of schools publish quality assurance metrics. The survey's defining conclusion is that architectural education today is more coherent in its declared values than in its institutional capacity to enact them — and that closing this gap is the most urgent task facing the discipline.

The full report is developed as: Global Survey of Schools of Architecture: Trends and Patterns, 2023–2026 (UIA Architectural Education Commission, 2026). The report will be available in August 2026, following the World Congress of Architects in Barcelona, June 2026.

Three peer-reviewed journal articles drawing on the survey data have been published:

• 1. • Patil, M. P., Salama, A. M., and Harrington, S. (2025). What a Global Survey Reveals about the Future of Architectural Education. UIA MAG.

     • Salama, A. M., Patil, M. P., and Harrington, S. (2026). Global Patterns of Navigating Uncertainty in Architectural Education. Architecture, 6(1), 49.

     • Patil, M. P., Salama, A. M., Harrington, S., and Hamza, N. (2026). Health and Well-Being in Architectural Education: Evidence from a Global Survey I. ABC2: Journal of Architecture, Building, Construction, and Cities, 2026(03), 60–85.

Pilot Survey of Architectural Education Systems

The Pilot Survey of Architectural Education Systems, conducted by Selma Harrington and Ashraf Salama between April and August 2024, offers a preliminary comparative assessment of architectural education across seventeen countries spanning all five UIA regions. Drawing on responses from academic leaders, educators, and practising architects — ranging from early-career professionals to those with over twenty years of experience — the survey examines how schools structure their programmes, prepare graduates for practice, integrate contemporary challenges into curricula, and maintain standards through accreditation. It served two purposes: to establish an early evidence base for EDUCOM's broader global agenda and to develop the methodology and analytical lens through which the subsequent global survey of 345 schools would be conducted.

The seventeen countries, inlcuding Australia, South Africa, Mali, Nigeria, Japan, the Philippines, Italy, Cabo Verde, Ukraine, China, Romania, Hungary, Ireland, Austria, Tunisia, Uruguay, and Brazil, were selected to span mature systems with centuries-old educational traditions alongside emerging programmes still establishing their structures. The mix reveals dramatic variation in professional scale: Japan reports 375,084 first-class architects, Brazil 215,000, and Italy 151,000, while Cabo Verde has 360 and Mali 200. School establishment dates range from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first, and the number of schools per country spans from one (Cabo Verde) to 840 (Brazil).

Despite this diversity, clear convergence emerges toward a standardised programme structure, with the three-plus-two Bachelor-Master model increasingly common globally alongside four- and five-year integrated professional degrees. Professional practice education and internships are nearly universal, though structures and durations vary considerably, from 600 hours in the Philippines to 24 months in Nigeria and Romania. Sustainability and the SDGs are widely embedded, though with significant variation in depth. Health and well-being, community development, inclusivity, and indigenous knowledge systems show the most uneven integration, with some institutions providing detailed accounts of curricular embedding and others offering minimal or no information,  a finding that directly shaped the design of the global survey that followed.

The full report is developed as: Pilot Survey of Architectural Education Systems, 2023–2026 (UIA Architectural Education Commission, 2026). The report will be available in August 2026, following the World Congress of Architects in Barcelona, June 2026.

UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education — Third Edition (2026)

The UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education was conceived by Ashraf Salama and established in 2019 under the auspices of EDUCOM to celebrate the multifaceted nature of innovation across the boundaries of cultures and geographies, and to promote inspiring pedagogical practices that contribute to the creation of sustainable environments. Building on the inaugural edition presented in Rio de Janeiro (2021) and the second edition in Copenhagen (2023), the third edition reached its largest and most geographically distributed cohort to date: 32 shortlisted entries from 22 countries across all five UIA regions, drawn from more than 70 registrations.

Salama served as Award Manager and Curator. The jury was chaired by Jana Revedin (Germany), UNESCO Delegate and EDUCOM Adviser, and comprised James B. Brown (Sweden), Karine Dupre (USA), Lindy Osborne Burton (Australia), and Jolanda Morkel (South Africa), with Andrii Markovskyi (Ukraine) as alternate. The technical committee consisted of Selma Harrington (Ireland), Kevin Bingham (South Africa), and Kaname Yanagisawa (Japan). Entries were assessed against six criteria: innovative pedagogy, impactful inquiry, inclusive learning, research-driven design education, interdisciplinary engagement, and contextual responsiveness. Five entries were awarded and four commended.

In its closing statement, the jury noted a consistent willingness across the shortlisted entries to bridge longstanding divides, between architecture and allied disciplines, between academic institutions and the communities they serve, between conceptual thinking and physical making, and between the campus and its broader urban and digital contexts. The entries offered a compelling spectrum of how architectural education is evolving to confront the complex realities of sustainable development, moving well beyond narrow environmental or technical framings to encompass social justice, civic engagement, heritage, health, and inclusion. The jury also noted, for the first time, active participation from Region V-Africa.

The awarded and commended entries spanned a wide range of pedagogical scales, from individual workshops and studio courses to comprehensive whole-programme transformations. The jury identified this diversity as a strength of the Award, while also recommending that future editions introduce two distinct submission categories, one for course- or studio-level innovation, another for systemic programme-level transformation, to allow more equitable comparative assessment. The jury further observed that inclusive learning was the least consistently evidenced criterion across the cycle, and encouraged future applicants to engage more deeply with the diversity of student learning needs and to document how their programmes create multiple pathways to learning.

The jury's closing statement reaffirmed the central role of architectural education in confronting the societal and environmental challenges facing the built environment. The breadth of focus areas represented, from climate action to health, from inclusivity and migration to community development, from resource efficiency to heritage conservation, confirms that the next generation of architects is being prepared to work across these interconnected domains with creativity, rigour, and ethical commitment.

The awards ceremony takes place on 2 July 2026 at the 29th UIA World Congress in Barcelona. The full Jury Report is available on the UIA Architectural Education Commission Page.

UNESCO-UIA Charter for Architectural Education — Review and Update

The UNESCO-UIA Charter for Architectural Education is the principal normative framework guiding the education of architects internationally. Originally approved in 1996 and revised on a sexennial cycle (2005, 2011, 2017, 2023), the Charter sets out the aims, objectives, capabilities, and conditions that architectural education should satisfy worldwide. EDUCOM was tasked with reviewing the Charter during the 2023–2026 triennale. Given the comprehensive sexennial update completed in 2023, which addressed the Sustainable Development Goals, regional and cultural variation, equity and inclusion, and the mobility of qualifications, the Commission approached the 2026 revision as a targeted triennial update addressing three specific and timely additions rather than a substantial rewriting of the document. The revised Charter was approved by the UIA Council on 21 April 2026 and is scheduled for ratification by the General Assembly at the 29th UIA World Congress in Barcelona in July 2026.

• A new Preamble: regenerative justice as the unifying frame. The most significant single change in the 2026 revision is a new Preamble, which reframes the mission of architectural education in terms that are more direct and more urgent than any previous edition. Where the 2023 Preamble addressed the qualitative development of the built environment and architects' responsibilities to 21st-century societies, the 2026 Preamble opens with the declaration that architecture must become a practice of regenerative justice. It recognises that environmental degradation and social marginalisation are not parallel challenges but expressions of the same structural condition, that communities with the fewest resources bear the greatest climate impacts, and that healing our relationship with the living world is inseparable from healing the divisions among people. The Preamble calls for a situated, active pedagogy that cultivates cultural belonging, social empathy, ecological literacy, and political awareness in equal measure. It recognises vulnerable communities as custodians of vital adaptive knowledge whose vernacular practices, amplified through the technologies and materials of tomorrow, form the basis of a regenerative discipline. Climate change, housing precarity, ecosystem collapse, and cultural erasure are identified not as discrete problems but as entangled consequences of systems that have treated people and environments as expendable, and the architect of the 21st century is called upon to hold commitments to carbon reduction, housing rights, biodiversity, and inclusivity not as competing priorities but as facets of a coherent sustainable ethic.

• New guidance on artificial intelligence. The 2026 revision introduces, for the first time in the Charter's history, a dedicated section on the use of artificial intelligence in architectural pedagogy and practice. Three principles are established. First, AI must function as a complement to, not a substitute for, design thinking: schools must ensure that the use of AI tools, including generative design, computational analysis, and large language models, deepens students' capacity for critical judgement, spatial reasoning, and creative synthesis, rather than diminishing it, and that graduates remain accountable for the social, environmental, and cultural consequences of their work. Second, equity, cultural diversity, and ethical responsibility must guide AI use: schools should critically examine the data, assumptions, and biases embedded in AI systems, preparing students to deploy these tools in ways that respect regional contexts, promote inclusion, and uphold the ethical responsibilities of the profession. Third, curricula and assessment must continuously adapt: given the pace of technological change, schools should regularly update pedagogical methods and evaluation frameworks to develop AI literacy alongside traditional competencies, ensuring that assessment can meaningfully distinguish a student's own design reasoning from AI-generated output.

• A formalised update cycle. The 2026 revision formalises, for the first time within the Charter itself, a clear description of the document's update cycle and process. Minor updates occur every three years (triennial), addressing wording and general statements; major updates are undertaken every six years (sexennial), addressing objectives and criteria. The process is documented step by step: the EDUCOM co-directors lead collaborative discussions with the membership; deliberations integrate strategic directions from the UIA Council and input from other commissions; EDUCOM members engage in consensus-building review; potential updates are discussed with the UIA President and UNESCO Delegate; co-directors compile refined proposals for Council consideration; and the revised Charter is presented at the UIA Assembly for formal adoption. All updates are recorded chronologically on the back cover of the Charter, maintaining a transparent revision history.

• Ashraf Salama was one of the original drafters of the UNESCO-UIA Charter in 1996 and co-directed its 2023 sexennial revision. The 2026 triennial revision was carried out under his co-directorship alongside Selma Harrington, with Jana Revedin as UNESCO Delegate and Adviser. The revised Charter is available on the UIA website.

Delivering the Promise: The Future of Architectural Education and the Role of the Architect in the 21st Century

The 2023–2026 triennale produced the most substantial evidence base ever assembled by EDUCOM — a pilot survey, a global survey of 345 schools across 159 countries, five international webinars, the third edition of the UIA Award, and a revised Charter, each activity informing the next. Collectively, they point toward a single defining conclusion: architectural education today declares values that its institutions have not yet fully developed the capacity to enact. Closing the gap between what schools say they stand for and what their curricula systematically teach is the most consequential task facing the discipline in the decade ahead.

This requires declared values to be embedded in core curricula rather than appended as electives, assessment calibrated to what is actually being taught, faculty incentives aligned with community-engaged and transdisciplinary work, and commitments sustained over time rather than announced and left unrealised.

Looking forward, the global survey establishes a baseline for longitudinal measurement; the webinar series, the Award, and engagement with allied organisations should deepen into structured partnerships; and a proposed working paper series will translate the triennale's findings into actionable guidance for accrediting bodies, schools, and professional chambers worldwide. The 2026 Charter revision consolidates these directions into a renewed normative framework, with the next sexennial revision in 2029 providing the opportunity to embed them more fully.

The promise of architectural education for the 21st century is a substantive commitment to students, to the societies they will serve, and to the planet they will inherit. The work ahead must deliver on it with greater reach, greater depth, and greater effect.