Architectural Engineers: Integrating Professions or Facilitating Communication

The design professions have always been an amorphous phenomena difficult to
merge under one label. New constellations continually emerge, questioning,
stretching, and reconfiguring the understanding of design and the professional
practices linked to it. In this paper the idea of architectural engineering is addresses from two perspectives – as an educational response and an occupational constellation.
Architecture and engineering are two of the traditional design professions and they frequently meet in the occupational setting, but at educational institutions they remain largely estranged. The paper builds on a multi-sited study of an architectural engineering program at the Technical University of Denmark and an architectural engineering team within an international engineering consultancy based on Denmark. They are both responding to new tendencies within the building industry where the role of engineers and architects increasingly overlap during the design process, but their approaches reflect different perceptions of the consequences.
The paper discusses some of the challenges that design education, not only within engineering, is facing today: young designers must be equipped with new types of competences and be able to manoeuvre in new types of constellations, but concurrently core competences must be preserved and the time of study kept at a minimum.