THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
Context is a crucial concept in architecture in spite of the frequent ambiguity around its use. Contextualism can be seen as a set of values, which help distinguish the architectural work. Even when times went by, context is as important as what It was a century ago. Architecture responds to the specific physical characteristics of its site. They design according to contextual factors include the nature of the surroundings that is natural and built elements. Basically, the context determines the architectural style, building material selection and site layout.
Fallingwater
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A great example of contextual architecture in the past is the well-known Fallingwater by the famous Frank Lloyd Wright. His first intention was to design an extraordinary house that redefined the relationship between man, architecture, and nature. Built in the year of 1939, Wright wanted to create harmony between man and nature, and his integration of the house with the waterfall was successful in doing so. The house’s terraces echo the pattern of the rock ledges below. The house has no walls facing the falls, only a central stone core for the fireplaces and stone columns. This provides elongated vistas leading the eye out to the horizon and the woods. The ceilings of the rooms are low, reaching only up to 6'4" in some places, in order to direct the eye horizontally to look outside. The beauty of these spaces is found in their extensions towards nature, done with long cantilevered terraces. Wright even bows to nature by bending a trellis beam to accommodate a pre-existing tree.
China Academy of Arts’ Folk Art Museum
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The folk art museum stands in the campus of China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. The site was formerly a tea field that formed a hillside. It was designed with the objectives of being in harmony with the environment and proposing a new relationship between people and art by creating seamless and highly diverse display spaces. Our point was to design a museum from which the ground below can be felt, by continuing the building’s floors that follow the ups and downs of the slope. Planning is based on the geometric division of the units of a parallelogram, to deal with the intricate topography. Each unit has a small individual roof, so the outlook became like a village that evokes a view of extending tiled roofs. Their sizes are all different, and that helps the architecture merge into the ground naturally. Old tiles for both the screen and the roof came from local houses. This methodology proposes the idea that rather than the gardens being in contrast with the architecture, the soil from the tea gardens is gradually transformed into the man-made architecture.
In a conclusion, we can see the two-contrary environment of the era from the past and in the present and both of this era shows how important contexts are to each of the building. Different generation play a different role of context in architecture but I believe context plays an important role in architecture from the past to now. Context in one of the main considerations while we designing the building to give a meananing beneath of archtecture. A building without considering context is nothing.