Established in 1911, Tsinghua University is one of the most famous universities of China, as well as an well-known institute of high education and advanced research of China. By the end of 2009, Tsinghua had 15 schools, 55 departments and a faculty of 7,062, including 1,232 professors, 1,727 associate professors and 2,829 lecturers; among them, 37 were member of China Academy of Science and 34 were member of China Academy of Engineering. Meanwhile, it had 35,369 students, including 1,765 international students; among them, 14,285 were undergraduate (including 886 international ones), 14,090 were graduate (including 886 international ones), and 6,994 were doctorate (including 125 international ones).
As one of Tsinghua University’s 15 schools, Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture (referred to as Tsinghua SA or the School hereafter) was transformed in 1988 from the former Department of Architecture which was established by Prof. LIANG Sicheng in October 1946. Currently, it is composed of four departments, nine research institutes, three professional practical sites, and three ministerial laboratories. In addition, the Institute of Architectural & Urban Studies, the Center for Human Settlements, and the Research Center of Building Energy-Saving affiliated to Tsinghua University are also located at School of Architecture.
Since the institutions of accreditation on undergraduate and graduate programs of architectural design and graduate programs of urban planning were implemented in China respectively in 1992, 1995 and 1998, Tsinghua SA has passed all the accreditations with the remark of excellent. And in the National Assessment on Architecture carried out by China Degree & Graduate Development Center in 2003, Tsinghua SA ranked No. 1 among China’s schools of architecture and took the leading position again in 2008 in the second national assessment.
Currently, Tsinghua SA has a faculty of 107, including 36 professors, 50 associate professors and 21 lecturers. Among them, four are member of China Academy of Science or/and China Academy of Technology, and four are from overseas. 85, or 80%, of the faculty have a doctoral degree and 67, or 63%, have an either academic or professional experience of at least 6 months abroad. The faculty team of high quality in terms of knowledge, passion, competence, and innovation becomes a fundamental guarantee to the high quality of education.
Since its establishment in 1946, Tsinghua SA has insisted on the goal of cultivating professional leaders of architecture and gradually confirmed its development strategy of being based on the Sciences of Human Settlements, paying due attention to the requirements of China’s construction and development and the challenges of academic frontiers, and combining education with research and practice. In the past decades, the School has finished over a hundred research projects commissioned by the government of various levels, as well as international collaborative research projects, which cover the fields of regional study, urban and rural study, urban planning and design, housing, architectural design and theory, architectural history and historic preservation, landscape planning & design, tourism planning and natural preservation, ecological planning and green architecture, built environment simulation and building energy-saving, computer aided design GIS and remote sensing, and so on.
Tsinghua SA has a high reputation both at home and abroad with thanks to its high quality of education and research. Every year, it can attract the best graduates of high school all over China through the National College Entry Examination. At the end of 2009, there were 977 registered students of architecture at Tsinghua SA, including 47 international students. Among them, 432 were undergraduate student (including 18 international one), 382 were graduate student (including 22 international one), and 158 were doctorate student (including 7 international ones).
In its history of more than 60 years, Tsinghua SA had more than 5,000 graduates in total, and most of them have played and are playing the role of professional leadership in the field of architecture both at home and abroad.
Currently, the finance of Tsinghua SA comes mainly from financial allocation, tuition revenue, research revenue and donation; which kept an annual average of 75 million yuna RMB in the past years.
