Typological Schemes of the Relationship between Architecture and Its Context

Phenomenology of the Background

Abstract

Through the use of graphic diagrams the article investigates an updated relationship between architecture and context, stemming from a new understanding of the contemporary reality. By a specific definition of project, considered as a way of designing rather than identified with its architectural object, this work retraces the evolving relationship between project and reality, context and object in order to clarify the logic structures of different approaches to design. Postmodernism claims that context, instead of being reduced to a given background, can be interpreted both as a subjective and relative framework. This new consciousness allows architecture to adopt conceptions inspired by contiguous disciplinary fields, and thus to modify the inside principles of the project itself. No hierarchies exist anymore between the object and its background. The overcoming of this dialectic implicates the ultimate fading of the vacuum in the fulness and the fullness in the vacuum, opening the needs for a new ontological research.