ABSTRACT
Context is one of the concentric rings of circumstance comprising our understanding of site: from lot to plot, from neighborhood to region, from locality to landscape to climate. It implies the whole set of conditions from which an architect will construct an idea of site suitable to a specific scheme, and will include the technologies used to shape the site, such as infrastructure and earth-moving machinery, as well as technologies of seeing that mediate any conception of what is unique and local at a site with images from other places. The concept of context is hard to pin down because it always points to surrounding circumstances; context is the crucible in which buildings happen. Complicating this, context is at once a general and a specialized, disciplinary term. The same word appears prominently in two dissimilar realms: a common, casual usage where it can signify a set of immediate general conditions that help situate meaning, and a narrower professional field, where it evokes both current debate and a history still fresh from the 1970s. But, insofar as architecture is part of everyday life, these usages blend. Thus, as a factor in the understanding of site, context emerges from multiple perspectives, not just disciplinary ones, and is reordered routinely by mostly uninvestigated conceptual mechanisms.2
