Given the current energy crises, recent efforts have been directed at bringing energy efficiency and environmental awareness across the board into architectural education in Egypt. Although interest in sustainable design teaching and learning started more than 20 years ago at both post graduate and undergraduate level in Egypt, ecological illiteracy persists in architecture education. There is a large gap between what our schools of architecture offer, what the regulations currently specify, and what the market demands. This paper investigates the role of the graduation design studio in rooting an understanding of sustainability in architectural higher education, taking an experimental design studio case as an example. During this studio, the students developed a range of skills and techniques that were of value to their graduation projects and which will stand by them later as architects in the future. Students were able to experience climatic conditions and building technology in a specific context and associated with specific local vernacular architecture. Such experience was used to develop new adaptive and responsive climatic architecture approaches by means of physical hands on test cell models in a living lab environment. The design studio focuses on passive solar approaches suitable for a hot arid climate. The paper aims to show how this design studio could be a pilot model for green architectural education in Egypt. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.