There is enough talk about sustainable design these days to keep architects acutely aware of its growing place in the practice, especially with new laws, tax credits, and voluntary standards like the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Rating System; what is less visible to the professional community, however, is the impact sustainability is having on education. "Schools are changing." says Vivian Loftness, dean of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "Now when students apply for a job, the question isn't just, 'Do you know AutoCAD?'-that's a given. Now they are asking, 'Do you know LEED?'" While LEED has given practicing architects and their clients a concrete set of criteria for green projects, academics and policymakers have been working on ways to incorporate environmental thinking and sustainable design into the curriculum of architecture schools. Driven by various aspects of sustainability, innovative programs are changing the way a number of schools approach architectural education, with promising results.
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