Reading context in design

Abstract

This study explores how, in the process of design, the reading of an existing order in the organizing features of a setting potentiates form. For this purpose, a design exercise on a site in the city of Jaipur in India has been chosen. The focus of the study lies in the way in which the natural and built environment of the site might relate to the larger urban context and its extensive systems and tightly controlled parts. It attempts to extract the essential elements of form and space in the natural and designed environment, and to discover their principles of organization. This study is conceived in an effort to internalize the tenets of a fundamental language in design process -- one that rejects the mediation of styles, and gains its validity both from existing aesthetic structures and from a reality which would affect and alter these structures.