As society faces the challenges of the changing world environment accompanying global warming, we can expect to experience depletion and exhausting of resources including reductions in energy consumption and insufficient access to food and water. In particular Japan faces an aging population paired with a rapidly declining birth rate leading to restructuring of societal systems and issues related to maintenance of architecture and civil infrastructure. To respond to these societal demands requires changes in lifestyles from increasing physical wealth to improving quality of life, as well as appropriate management of not only the architecture and civil infrastructure but also the surrounding territorial environment. To accomplish this we seek to educate excelling engineers with whom the future will be entrusted, equipping them with appropriate technical capabilities.

The Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology is engaged in research of technology to design urban and regional architecture and civil infrastructure as well as territorial environment and manage these as systems in order to provide an environment of high quality of life within a safe and trustworthy social framework. The Department also provides educational programs to cultivate engineers familiar with the necessary technology. That is, while fusing architectural studies with civil engineering that are conventional academic fields, we are seeking to develop a new area of studies that actively incorporates elements from social sciences and the humanities. Our research covers aspects including fundamental studies necessary for the sustainable development of cities and regions and creative research implemented with the aim of generating new value for the society of the future. By reflecting this work in our educational program, our goal is to foster practical and creative engineers able to perform internationally equipped with ability to both design and manage using specialized knowledge garnered from the fields of architecture and civil engineering.

To bring these goals to fruition we completely renewed the curriculum in the 2010 academic year to enrich the fundamental course while proactively incorporating specific topics from humanities and social sciences. That is, to add depth to the engineering education our design curriculum draws from historical and cultural sources while our management curriculum reflects specialized topics including finance and law. In terms of our research into design and management we seek build on our two core areas: “architecture and urban design” as well as “urban and regional management.” From 2010, the existing architectural engineering curriculum has been nearly entirely revised to match the above concepts and we started educating engineers with a new academic system.