ABSTRACT
Contextualism was an anathema to the international style. In reaction to the placelessness of modern architecture, contextualism emerged in the 1960s, first in Colin Rowe’s studio at Cornell, and soon after in almost every design studios in North America. The notion of responding to an immediate context remained a popular and simplistic recipe for restoring meaning and a sense of place to architecture. It only lasted for a short period of time, as post-modern architecture shifted the notion of context from the spatial to the temporal. In the twenty-first century the relationship between contextualism and design is more mixed. Contemporary digitally based architecture is once again forgoing contextualism in favor of the exploration of blobs, folds, and boxes. The design of the new Seattle Public Library caused a ruckus among those citizens concerned about preserving the undistinguished context that the 2004 Koolhaas building was to inhabit (Figure 37).
