Investigating the Possibility of Revising the Curriculum of Bachelor of Architecture Courses with a Local Perspective Case Study: Universities of Mazandaran

The curriculum of architecture courses in Iran has been reviewed several times; but no attention has been paid to the local approach. This article seeks to review the possibility of revising the curriculum of Bachelor of Architecture with a local perspective to minimize the educational shortcomings of the curriculum of architecture courses. Mazandaran Universities has been selected as a case study. The research method in this research is content analysis which has been done through semi-structured interviews with 20 professors and 20 architecture graduates of four universities in Mazandaran province: 1. Mazandaran University, 2. Babol Noshirvani University of Technology (BNUT), 3. Shomal University and 4. Islamic Azad University – Sari. Also, the syllabus approved by the Ministry of Science were studied and then the findings have been reviewed and discussed according to the results of the interviews and the analysis of their content. The results show that the reason for the need to develop a new curriculum for the Bachelor of Architecture with an approach to localism and in accordance with the conditions and needs of Mazandaran Universities can be divided into 4 main subcategories: 1. Form appropriate to the climate, 2. Lack of knowledge of local architecture, 3. knowledge of local materials, and 4. limited research in the field of indigenous architecture, which is mostly related to the sub-category of "lack of knowledge of local architecture" and the benefits of paying attention to it, along with the negative impacts of neglecting it. The need to pay attention to the types of indigenous needs in the field of architecture can be divided into 3 sub-categories, including: 1. raising  awareness about the needs of society, 2. considering the familiarity and preserving indigenous history and culture, 3. attention to contextual and regional needs, and the most common reason is related to two sub-categories of "considering the familiarity and preservation of indigenous history and culture" and "attention to contextual and regional needs". Most important reasons for the interviewees in terms of frequency were as follows: 1. more attention should be paid to the preservation of important and historical buildings in architecture education, 2. in most cities of Iran, regardless of the principles and climate, etc., the designs are often subject to repetitive patterns, which unfortunately sometimes have no justification, 3. familiarity with the urban infrastructure of each region, to properly understand the sustainability needs of each region in order to design the desired architecture, 4. considering different cultures, histories, climates and, most importantly, different needs of people 5. architects should be able to rehabilitate existing traditional buildings, both mentally and technically, and not think about destroying the building due to ignorance, 6. architectural educational trips to understand and learn from buildings that have proper functions as well as buildings that do not, 7. architecture students can increase their creativity in the field of design by being inspired by the spaces and arts within them.