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Context theory
Environmental design and planning rest on theories of how new development should relate to its context. When decisions have been taken they are implemented by means of Land Use Plans, Zoning Plans and Environmental Assessments. A number of context theories set out principles for relationships new designs and the existing environment. Urban, city, or town planning, deals with design of the built environment from the municipal and metropolitan perspective. ...
A typical zoning map; this one identifies the zones, or development districts, in the city of Ontario, California Zoning is a North American term for a system of land-use regulation. ...
According to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) whenever the U.S. Federal Government takes a major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment it must first consider the environmental impact in a document called an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). ...
Picturesque theorists argued that landscapes should be composed 'like a picture' (ie a landscape painting) with a foreground, a middleground and a background. The theory was applied to landscape gardens in the eighteenth century and as Nikolaus Pevsner argued to the wider topic of regional planning in the twentieth century. This produced the context theory that towns (the foreground) should be compact and urban, that the surrounding countryside (the middleground) should retain its agricultural character and that remote areas (the background) should remain as natural parks. Though the concept of the sublime had roots in the connoisseurship of Antiquity, the picturesque was a new category in the incipient Romantic sensibility of the 18th century. ...
The term landscape garden is often used to describe the English garden design style characteristic of the eighteenth century, particularly with the work of Lancelot Capability Brown. ...
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner CBE (January 30, 1902 – August 18, 1983) was a German-born British historian of art and, especially, architecture. ...
Regional planning is a branch of land use planning and deals with the efficient placement of land use activities, infrastructure and settlement growth across a significantly larger area of land than an individual city or town. ...
Modernist town planners lacked sympathy with picturesque context theory. Their firm belief that 'form follows function' led to the prioritising of human needs over environmental considerations. When planning a new road, for example, the emphasis was on traffic analysis and engineering rather than on the relationship between the new road and its environmental context. Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. ...
Ian McHarg opposed Modernist planning in his book Design with nature. He believed that new development should be preceded by the fullest possible analysis of the environmental context in which building would take place. The highway planners who were, in his view, destroying the American landscape at that time were described as 'highwaymen'. Ian McHarg Ian L. McHarg (1920-2001) was a landscape architect and the founder of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. ...
Kenneth Frampton put forward a context theory which he described as Critical Regionalism to help decide the relationship between new architecture and its contex. He believed that designers should make a critical response, rather than a sentimental or copyist response, to local design traditions.
Tom Turner, in Chapter 3 of a book on Landscape planning and environmental impact design (1998), argued for a broad approach to context theory based on an index of Similarity, Identity and Difference (the SID Index): 'On different occasions... a powerful case can be made for developments which are "similar to", "identical with" or "different from" their surroundings' (p88). Tom Turner is an English landscape architect and garden historian teaching at the University of Greenwich in London. ...
See also Urban, city, or town planning, deals with design of the built environment from the municipal and metropolitan perspective. ...
A typical zoning map; this one identifies the zones, or development districts, in the city of Ontario, California Zoning is a North American term for a system of land-use regulation. ...
According to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) whenever the U.S. Federal Government takes a major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment it must first consider the environmental impact in a document called an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). ...
External links - Environmental Design Research Association
- Essay on architecture, language and the environment
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