Context : physical and psycho-cultural : a design for the concert hall in Sarajevo, Bosnia

Abstract

The thesis proposes a mode of designing that emphasizes the active role that the physical context, including its embedded cultural implications and poetic ideas, might play in the process of architectural design. A successful architectural project in that sense would not only be visually related to its context in a meaningful way, but its form giving conceptual framework would be part of an idea about the site and its relation to the context. Three different modes of architectural inquiry mutually inform each other. While the discussion of contextual theory, namely Contextualism and Phenomenology, seeks to ground the making of reflected contextual references in its underlying cultural and philosophical value systems, the design component not only tested contextual design strategies, but, more importantly, shaped the mode of the theoretical inquiry. Together with case studies that cover a broad spectrum of different contexts and their architectural responses, they identified the critical issue of balancing between the normative urban space and the site specific components.