Context (One)

There are a fabulous number of buzzwords in the architectural realm. There's a bizarre need for ideas to be "organic", "generative" or, my personal favorite (not really), "dynamic". Most of the time these are thrown around so flippantly that they've lost any real semblance of meaning. Even when they are used with a particular meaning in mind, the overuse of the words has caused a cornucopia of understandings. Essentially, people are talking about different things all while using the same words.

What's most amazing is that no one really seems to notice this. They'll have a conversation with a colleague, superior, or student without realizing that the other has absolutely no clue what is being said. This is fun to watch, if you can hold both meanings of the word in your head at the same time, like an Abbott and Costello skit.

Incidentally, the ability to understand contradictory situations at once has been held up as one of the ways in which Humans separate themselves from the Lesser Animals. Of course, before that was metacognition(disproved through rats, of all animals), and before that was self recognition (disproved through elephants,, dolphins, and others), and so forth. I digress, but that's ok, because that's the sort of thing that i'm interested in anyway.

So if you can hold those two ideas in your mind at once, you'll notice that the conversationalists are not even truly responding to one another but rather homing in on a single word (usually the misunderstood one) and saying anything that they know about that particular word-concept. While this continues the talking, it doesn't really push the conversation anywhere. I would say this kind of speech doesn't serve any useful purpose, but i suppose it helps to elicit an image of a polite, informed individual to the other person. After all, if you're lucky they'll assume you're really smart and know much more about the topic than they do.

What i really wanted this post to be about, though, was context, which is, admittedly, one of those kinds of words.

Context is often shunted to the side of an architectural project, or at best considered to be on par with issues like form and function. But i argue that while words like environment, culture, and other local factors relate to particulars (that is, they exclude certain qualities), the locus of topics within context is infinite (plainly said, nothing is not part of context). You might rightly say that developments in the fishing industry has no cultural impact on Tibetan farming villages. What you're doing is putting fishing in the context of the farming village. It's inescapable.

So when so-called experts make claims like 'this building does a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings, but fails programmatically because the local vernacular style is ill suited to the construction style of a hospital/school/absurdly dangerous chemicals plant', they're ignoring the idea that the local vernacular style being ill suited to the construction style of whatever IS the contextual relationship to its surroundings.

On a side note, a teacher of mine way back in high school informed me that her husband owned some kind of small factory (i want to say it made fire extinguishers, but that's almost too ironic) which produced a large amount of shredded scrap magnesium. As you may or may not know, magnesium, in the presence of friction, ignites. Explosively. With a white-hot searing flame of permanent annihilation. Ok, i made up the last part of that, but i think it actually is white flame. That's not important in the context of this article, i was talking about um, something.

The thing those "experts" are overlooking is at the crux of my argument. If the building failed to take into consideration the program, then it did not "do a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings."

When you look at context, you have to look at everything. And that's key -- in all facets of life.