CONTEXT

Historic, Cultural and Geographic Context

In the computing world, ‘New opportunities have engendered considerable interest in context-aware computing —computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used.’ (1) This is an introduction to interactive technologies that adjust to certain settings and contexts.

Here we can see that context is a consideration used to adapt and respond to create something, giving reason to the decisions made in any field, not just computing.

The historic, cultural and geographic aspects affect any field, in literature, law and legislation, social sciences, architecture and this list can go on. In architecture it is definitely an important consideration when thinking about the surroundings of a building, physical and theoretical. These context considerations are used when creating something new or to analyse something old.

The historical context will affect its ‘heritage’ characteristics and explain the society at the time and their influences; the cultural aspects of the now and the present and how the building ‘fits in’ to the society and its values; and the physical surroundings and where it is situated in relation to other buildings and the environment.

As Crisman explains in his article about Architectural Styles from The Whole Building Design Guide website, she speaks of how to decide on a style for a new building and the how it relates to other aspects.
"Relating to the context" means fully understanding this existing context [“which Architectural ‘context’ refers to the immediate physical, cultural, and even economic surroundings of a building”] and developing a clear strategy for how a new building will relate to these conditions. A difficult aspect of context is that it is always changing, unless a project is situated within a protected historic district where few physical changes are permitted.(2)

Then she speaks of how the geographic context influences the building design. Every building has a geographical ‘Place’ and “must be understood at a range of scales—national, regional, local, neighborhood, block, and immediate adjacencies.” (2)

The geographical understanding of the unbuilt Silkeborg Museum; The existing Silkeborg Museum, which our part of the museum (the unbuilt one) would have been adjacent to, is situated in the town of Silkeborg, Denmark, 45 km from the city of Århus. The town of Silkeborg has many forests and gardens and the existing Museum is apparently the oldest building in town. Jorn Utzon designed the building with simple materials to not over exaggerate above the textures of the historic existing museum but used the form and shape to make his building significant and stand out.

There should be reasons for all the decisions made in creating a building or analyzing an existing one and these reasons should, within any time frame, consider the historic, cultural and geographic contexts.

(1) Paul Dourish, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Context’, School of Information and Computer Science, http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/publications/2004/PUC2004-context.pdf

(2) Phoebe Crisman, ‘Style’, The Whole Building Design Guide, http://www.wbdg.org/resources/style.php, last updated 05-23-2008