Architectural contextualism and emerging hybrid morphologies

Architectural contextualism and emerging hybrid morphologies

Komez, E.

Architecture and The Built Environment

2012-10-16

Infrastructure networks have always been the primary feature of urbanism. As any aspects of urban environments, the understanding of infrastructure networks and their practices have witnessed changes due to the shifts first to modernist ideal and then to the globalized world view. In oppose to the former fragmented nature of infrastructure networks, modern urbanism proposed centralized, standardized and ordered planning of infrastructures. However, this coherent understanding is abandoned as globalization and its economic organization trigger liberalization and privatization of infrastructure which leads to ‘splintering urbanism’, a term coined by Graham and Marvin (2001). In addition to these developments, the process of deindustrialization converted the industrial sites of the modern planning into the problematic urban areas. Industries were moved away and networks which once served to integrate these areas were decayed, became obsolete and started to split urban areas. These changing urban conditions demand new spatial configurations. Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum is a good example for discussing the changing urban conditions and the emerging new practices of architecture. The project was designed by the architectural firm Weiss/Manfredi, completed in 2007 and won the Veronica Rudge Green Prize same year. Located in a former industrial site in Seattle, an emblematic condition of above-mentioned urban problems, project generates a new spatial configuration based on contextual design strategies. The context debate is not new in the field of architecture and in order to comprehensively understand the emerging new practices, post-war context debate, which was characterized by the works of Team X, Ernesto Rogers, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe and Robert Venturi, has to be revisited. Thus, the aim of the essay is to examine the contextual design strategies of the Olympic Sculpture Park Project in relation to the post-war architectural context-debate. Finally, it is asserted that new spatial configurations of architecture are characterized by the use of contextual strategies that leads to the hybridization of morphology.

splintering urbanism
contextualism
hybrid morphologies
infrastructure
landscape
Olympic sculpture park

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:25924613-cddf-45f0-b183-a339eb8053b0

EAAE/ISUF international conference "New urban configurations", Delft, The Netherlands, 16-19 October 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 Komez, E.