The Context Debate: An Archaeology

Context is a crucial concept in architecture in spite of the frequent ambiguity around its use. Although the consideration of context is intrinsic to the process of architectural design, in contemporary theory, little attention is paid to it. By way of contrast, in the 1950s, various architects, theorists, and teachers cultivated several perspectives on context as a way of addressing some of the ill effects of modern architectural orthodoxy. Although a topic of layered and productive debate in the post-war years, context fell into disrepute in the critical architectural discourse of the 1980s. This paper provides an archaeology of the “context debate” in the hope that it may be possible to reveal its forgotten dimensions and flexibility.


INTRODUCTION
Architectural discourse has rarely been defined more wittily than through the concept of prosthesis. Mark Wigley introduced prosthesis as a metaphor to describe both the physical and conceptual extension of architecture into the university, the institutional home of the thesis, where arguments are-as the Greek root tithenai suggests-proposed, positioned, and defended. 1 According to Wigley, "the concept of prosthesis is always already architectural", while "architectural discourse is itself a prosthesis". 2 Architecture provides metaphors for talking about a thesis: arguments require "grounds", they build upon stable "foundations", and so on. Furthermore, architectural discourse is prosthetic, for it constantly artificially attaches itself to or expands on debates generated in fine arts or sciences. In addition to using prosthesis as a metaphor for explaining architectural discourse and its institutionalisation, Wigley defined buildings as prosthesis as well. He endorsed techno-aesthetics from modernist architecture as a technological prosthesis to contemporary architecture of digital prosthetics. In fact, a building is not only a technological prosthetic extension of the human body, as the modernist discourse claims, but it is also prosthetic to social, cultural, physical, and historical layers of its context. In this regard, prosthetic architectural discourse has potentials in comfortably engaging with emerging paradigms in philosophy, technology, the humanities, and the social sciences to reflect on diverse layers of context. However, being prosthetic is also a weakness, since context in architecture can also easily be manipulated, dominated, or absorbed by political regimes.
Understanding of context is an inherent property of architectural practice, although it has hardly ever become central to architectural theory and discourse. Always encapsulating a definition beyond the physical features of a site, context is embedded in the notion of genius loci, translated today as "spirit of place", in old Roman architecture. 3 In Renaissance architecture, decorum, inherited from Vitruvius' décor, was developed as a key strategy to communicate with context through symbolism. 4 École des Beaux-Arts introduced tirer parti, meaning making the best from what is found in the existing physical and political context, which, however, later came to be dominated by prendre parti, prioritising the freestanding object. 5 Freestanding and mass-produced building later became a canon of modernist architecture for which previous implications of context were supplanted by a tabula rasa approach, the break with history and tradition, notions of designing from the inside out, etc. However, modernism's progressive and emancipatory dimensions were questioned deeply after the two world wars of the twentieth century, which also cast a shadow over the legacy and supremacy of orthodox modern architecture. Triggered by the destructive post-war constructions, new definitions of context were reintroduced in the field of architecture in the early 1950s. Their principal aim was to cross-fertilise the progressive dimension of modernist architecture by cultivating the existing circumstances, rather than projecting a utopian ideal. However, context as an intrinsic value of architectural design again faded away after the 1980s when contextualism imposed a blinkered understanding and was subsequently challenged by the autonomy paradigm.
Architectural autonomy was widely disseminated through the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies founded by the American architect Peter Eisenman and its journal, Oppositions. While many architectural theoreticians and historians such as Manfredo Tafuri viewed autonomy as a resistance to the capitalist cycle of production-distribution-consumption, Eisenman's framing of autonomy was rather seeking to codify architecture as a self-contained discipline having its own intrinsic formal principles. Defining context as extrinsic to the architectural design process, Eisenman's disciplinary autonomy framed "critical architecture" as resistant to "external forces". This argument was expanded by the writings of the architectural historian and theoretician K. Michael Hays, who himself stood for a more nuanced position. Hays argued for "a critical position between culture as a massive body of self-perpetuating ideas and form supposedly free of circumstance". 6 The "circumstance" from which he declared form free can be read as the immediate social, physical, and material context. Hays' critical architecture is therefore a distanced practice, which clearly separates itself from all that is "external" to it.
Attacking criticality, the empowerment of theory and distanced practice upheld by the proponents of disciplinary autonomy, the new architectural pragmatism was developed in the early 2000s and has since become the dominant paradigm in the field. Defining or defending architecture not as a discourse but as a practice, the new architectural pragmatists have launched an "assault on something called 'the critical' or 'critical architecture' , usually accompanied by a collateral assault on something called 'theory'". 7 Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting showed how this new paradigm proposed projective architectural practice against the dominance of critical theory in academia in an article that challenged the "critical project" of Michael Hays and Peter Eisenman, for whom it is claimed "disciplinarity is understood as autonomy" (enabling critique, representation, and signification), but not as instrumentality (projection, performativity, and pragmatics). 8 Somol and Whiting introduced Rem Koolhaas as opposed to Eisenman to support their campaign for a shift of disciplinarity from "autonomy and process" to "force and effect". 9 Although the new architectural pragmatists are claiming today an engaged architectural practice taking into account "how the context and the viewer 'complete' the work of art", they do not and are perhaps not willing to generate a critical, theoretical, and discursive reflection on context. 10 As their protagonist Koolhaas' "fuck context" statement shows, architects, when they become agents of global neoliberalism, can ignore contextual concerns since the purpose of their pragmatism is to allow them to operate in different territories under contradictory political regimes and social conditions. 11 Equating criticality and theory with Eisenman's call for autonomy, new pragmatists abandon them. In fact, engaged architectural practice is possible without abandoning the notions of discourse, theory, and criticality. A reassessment of context, the theoretical elaboration of which comes some decades before both the doctrine of autonomy and the current pragmatism, reveals why this might be the case. The term context, literally meaning weaving together, was introduced to the field of architecture in the middle of the last century to draw attention to the relationship between the individual structure and a neglected urbanism. Diverse and subtle approaches to context emerged during the 1950s and 1960s through critiques of orthodox modernist architecture's tabula rasa approach to the city, the fixation on designing buildings "from the inside out", and the valorisation of breaks with history and tradition. This essay presents an archaeology of the context debate to show how engaged architectural practice can embody criticality and theory while performing architecture as a prosthetic discourse.

POSTMODERN CONTEXTUALISM
In the 1980s, contextualism was mainly associated with conformity and visual compatibility with the surrounding built environments. In the USA, due to the growing influence of the American Preservationist Movement, professional discussion had begun to revolve around the integration of new buildings into their historical surroundings. Keith Ray noted an increasing familiarity with the terms reservation, restoration, adaptive use, and contextual design due to the growing interest in historical buildings in America. He stated that: To remain of service to society, these [historical buildings] have to be modified for new uses-or new buildings have to be inserted among the existing ones to maintain the living fabric of our cities. But modification to existing buildings and new buildings cognizant of their surroundings present unfamiliar design relationships between the new and old. Contextual design, designing in relation to the context, then, is the point of this book. It elucidates the design relationship between old and new buildings by illustrating the variety of options available. 12 Criticising modernism's disregard for context, its break with the past, and the doctrine of the "spirit of the times", Brent Brolin also emphasised the importance of visual continuity and defined it as one of the most important tasks of architects, planners, and developers. 13 In this regard, he discussed the role of form, scale, ornament, materials, and details in fitting architectural works to their contexts. Linda Groat developed a checklist for architects, covering items that should be considered in fitting new buildings to old neighbourhoods. 14 She emphasised the importance of using elements derived from the façades of surrounding buildings. 15 In Britain, a policy of sympathetically tailoring the visual fit of new architecture to established neighbourhoods has been endorsed by the Prince of Wales. Prince Charles has advocated neo-traditional principles in urban design as elaborated and disseminated through The Prince's Foundation for Building Community (formerly The Institute of Architecture from 1986 to 2001 and The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment from 2001 to 2012). One of the first instances of an intervention by Prince Charles in architecture was in 1984, when he gave a speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on its 150th anniversary. In his speech, he attacked the modernist architect Peter Ahrends' proposed extension of the National Gallery in London as a "monstrous carbuncle". Prince Charles' architectural vision, arguing for a subtle reconnection to tradition and nature, was recently outlined in a piece written for The Architectural Review in 2014. At the end of the article, he proposed ten geometric principles of urban design: respect to land, architecture as language, attention to scale (human propositions), achieving harmony through diversity, well-designed enclosures, drawing on local building materials, reducing the use of signs and lights, pedestrian-centred designs, achieving density, and flexibility. 16 Prince Charles' ideas referred to an understanding of context as the consolidation of traditionally built harmonious urban environments.
Beginning from the 1980s, this rather reductive and blinkered understanding of context was criticised by the neo-avant-gardes or "critical architects", who associated contextualism with uniformity and conformity. Eisenman's "autonomy" was enlisted by these avant-gardes in opposition to contextual theories. In addition to Eisenman's attack on contextual practices, the critique of contextualism aired by many architects, theoreticians, and philosophers was also motivated by a more general disapproval of postmodern architecture. For instance, Paul-Alan Johnson criticised context for imposing conformity and continuity by being historicist and authoritarian. 17 Political theorist Fredric Jameson criticised "postmodernism's more general contextualism" by identifying its call for difference as a by-product of the multinational capitalism that it claimed to oppose. 18 In 1988, avant-garde architects came together in the Museum of Modern Art's (MOMA's) Deconstructivist Architecture Exhibition to attack postmodernism and its contextualism. Curators Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley asserted that "contextualism has been used as an excuse for mediocrity, for a dumb servility to the familiar". 19 By way of contrast, they argued, their avant-garde architecture was critically distant from any authority claimed by the context of an architectural object.
The Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in MOMA hosted the works of Coop Himmelb(l) au, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi, who are labelled today as starchitects, figures known globally for their iconic buildings designed as detached spectacular objects celebrating architecture's deterritorialisation. At a recent panel discussion for the 25th anniversary of the exhibition, Wigley asked, "Could an exhibition similar to Deconstructivist Architecture happen today? Does today's architectural climate invite a genre-defining moment?" 20 Tschumi's answer, as reported by John Hill, was interesting, since he "asserted that there is nothing today to battle, like postmodern architecture 25 years ago"; Hill noted further that Tschumi then "offered that a show now would be called 'Iconism' , addressing the obsessions of architects to make icons". 21 If the report was accurate, Tschumi was thereby calling for an exhibition criticising the position that he and his peers had implicitly endorsed a quarter of a century ago. While architectural contextualism was harshly attacked after the 1980s due to its conformism and association with postmodernism, Tschumi's comments make clear that context in architecture needs to be revisited. 22 However, the critiques of the notion of context also triggered a search for new vocabularies in contemporary architectural theory and practice. George Dodds has argued that "instauration" is a more comprehensive term than contextualism, since it recognises the cultural and temporal realities of sites. 23 "Field", introduced mostly through the writings of Stan Allen, is another new concept proposed to replace the word "context". 24 Likewise, The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture states that "the notion of 'field' in reference to place-and not that of 'context' or, at least, that of 'contextual'-suggests a new, more open and abstract, more flexible and receptive (reactive) condition of the contemporary project vis-à-vis the environment, far removed from classical evocation or modern (im)position". 25 Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn discuss the importance of site-related issues in architecture, but they propose the use of the word "site" rather than "context", as site is defined as a more open relational construct. 26 Sandy Isenstadt provides a brief mapping of the evolution of the term "context", where he characterises its limitations as: "In the United States today, taking up the issue of context implies a formal profile, directing attention to the past by directing it toward existing surroundings, especially in comparison with site, a more general term without a specific formal trajectory". 27 Although several figures introduced concepts related to context after the 1990s, they have not developed a stimulating debate for a governing architectural paradigm or a critical insight on contemporary built environments. Moreover, the notion of context is still very present in much architectural thinking and expression today, through design studios, publications, and discussions. However, as stated, a critical and generative debate on context is absent in contemporary theoretical architectural discourse since its dismissal by the neo-avant-gardes. In other words, theoretical discussion of context has collapsed since the 1980s when it became operational for conformists and traditionalists. In fact, various architects, theoreticians, and teachers generated a debate on context in the 1950s by aiming to heal the ill effects of orthodox modern architecture and planning. They took part in an implicit and multilayered discussion on context by taking it as an intrinsic value of the architectural design process. In order to reclaim a critical understanding of context today, the notion has to be freed from accumulated associations with a now-frozen catalogue of stylistic and formal characteristics. In this regard, the article will next introduce the layered context debate of the 1950s to uncover its hidden or forgotten multiple dimensions.

THE CONTEXT DEBATE
The notion of context was not yet prevalent in the architectural discourse of the 1940s. However, it was implicitly defined as the perceptual form of the built environment, and displayed the influence of either visual studies based on Gestalt principles or re-emerging traditional picturesque theories. Gestalt (meaning shape and form in German) psychology was developed at the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gestalt theorists criticised the scientific method of solving problems by analysis, breaking them into fragments, and reassembling them after discovering their inner laws: they, instead, claimed that wholes have their own intrinsic laws independent of the sole character of the fragments. 28 Gestalt psychology became influential in the USA after the mid-1930s when its protagonists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka left Nazi Germany and moved there. Lynch selected three urban areas as case studies: Los Angeles, Boston, and New Jersey. His research method was to interview a small sample of citizens from each area about their image of their environment and then request them to draw a sketch map of their perception of it. Mental maps were derived from these verbal interviews and sketch drawings, which were analysed in reference to five distinct elements of a city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. The focus of the study was on the perceptual form of the city; as Lynch stated: This analysis limits itself to the effects of physical, perceptible objects. There are other influences on imageability, such as the social meaning of an area, its function, its history, or even its name. These will be glossed over, since the objective here is to uncover the role of form itself. 29 While perception of sprawling cities from a mobilised gaze was the main concern in the USA, the focus in Europe and the UK in the 1950s was on the coherent spatial experiences of pedestrian-scale city centres. The English townscape movement was one of the protagonists of this debate. The townscape movement was disseminated mainly by Architectural Review and introduced first in 1949 by the journal's editor, Hubert De Cronin Hastings, with an article he wrote under the pseudonym Ivor de Wolfe. 30 The journal proposed the eighteenth-century English Picturesque theory as an alternative to the ongoing post-war construction in England shaped by the government's Town Planning Acts (1943, 1944, and 1947). 31 As de Wolfe's article suggests, the aim of the townscape movement was to establish a vocabulary of the English visual philosophy of landscape through the study of precedents. To exemplify such study, the article was followed by a casebook prepared by the art editor of the journal, Gordon Cullen, which later expanded into the book, The Concise Townscape. In these publications, understanding of context as the perceptual form of built environments was presented by serial vision drawings capturing sequential experience of moving through urban spaces.
Criticising the English picturesque tradition and the townscape approach, British architects of the Team 10 group, Alison and Peter Smithson, advocated a different understanding of context in the 1950s. Context for them was the everyday social practices and things as found in existing environments. Being also members of the Independent Group, which generated the pop art movement in England, the Smithsons engaged with the aesthetics of mass culture as most visible in their "as found" approach presented at the "Parallel of Life and Art" exhibition in 1953 and the "Patio & Pavilion" installation at the "This is Tomorrow" exhibition in 1956. For these exhibitions, the Smithsons collaborated with a photographer member of the Independent Group, Nigel Henderson, whose street photography captured the patterns of everyday life that informed their "as found" aesthetic. 32 The Smithsons countered the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) grid by introducing their Urban Re-identification Grid in 1953, which showed the social and spatial patterns of one of London's most ordinary neighbourhoods, Bethnal Green, through Henderson's photographs. Hence, the Smithsons' understanding of context was not limited to the physical aspects of built environments, but attempted to accommodate social praxis. Not using the term "context" in their early writings, the Smithsons generated the notion socioplastics, meaning "the relationship between the built form and social practice". 33 In 1950s Italy, pre-existing environment was also central to the understanding of context with a different connotation, as most visible in the writings of Ernesto N. Rogers. Rogers was the editor of the journal Casabella between 1953 and 1965. During that period, he added the word Continuità to the title of the journal. In his first editorial text titled "Continuity", Rogers defined the problem of architectural discourse and the practice of the period as "modernist formalism" and "the chauvinism of the nostalgic…demagogic folklorism" that arose against it. 34 In this regard, he used the term continuity to overcome the crisis of Modern Movement in general, and Italian modern culture in particular, by combining the premises of modernism with Italy's deeprooted traditions. 35 His answer to the problem was to develop contextual architecture, which embodied "historical awareness" and "responsibility towards tradition", where building reflects the character of its natural and historical environments without imitating past forms. Rather than the notion context, he used the terms le preesistenze ambientali (surrounding pre-existences), or ambiente, referring to the historical, natural, and picturesque character of built environments. Although Rogers was against historical revivalism, he adapted the formal repertoire of the surrounding built fabric, especially in his later works, as is most clearly seen in his Torre Velasca project. 36 In the end, Rogers' ambiente became associated with formalist scene-making, which referred not (only) to the compositionality of its immediate physical surroundings, but (also) to the city's picturesqueness as reflected through its historical and natural forms.
Discussion on context in Italy can be further followed in the early writings of Aldo Rossi, who was part of the editorial board of Casabella Continuità during the editorship of Ernesto N. Rogers. Articles published in this journal later constructed the base of Rossi's 1966 book, L'Architettura della Città, where he introduced the notion of locus, defined as "a relationship between a certain specific location and the buildings that are in it". 37 As this definition implies, context was not an a priori condition for Rossi, but a relational phenomenon derived from the interaction of place with the urban artefacts. Criticising understanding of context as a compositional entity or a scene-making strategy, which was his master Rogers' position, Rossi defined context as a singularity of place constructed through architecture. In other words, Rossi was opposed to the understanding of context as a frozen present condition, since he asserted that the city is constructed over time. The Architecture of the City appeared in English in 1982. Readers of this English translation encountered Rossi's criticism of context in his statement: "context seems strangely bound up with illusion, with illusionism. As such it has nothing to do with the architecture of the city, but rather with the making of a scene". 38 In fact, Rossi himself did not use the term "context" or its Italian equivalent contesto in the original Italian. His criticism of illusionary scene-making was rather directed towards Rogers' ambiente.
American architect Robert Venturi completed his Master's thesis at Princeton University School of Architecture in 1950: it turned out to be one of the first sources in the field of architecture introducing the notion of context. 39 In the thesis, he criticised the understanding of architecture as a self-contained entity and emphasised rather the larger wholes these entities compose. Influenced by Gestalt psychology, Venturi's main argument was twofold. First, he proposed that "context gives a building expression, its meaning", which means "a building is not a self-contained object but a part in a whole composition relative to other parts and the whole". 40 Second, he claimed that "change in context causes change in expression", which is explained further in the statement, "change of a part (addition or alteration) causes a change in the other parts and in the whole". 41 By using abstract Gestalt diagrams, Venturi addressed the role of objects' position and form in shaping urban compositions. 42 Venturi's early definition of context as urban composition included spatial and perceptual experiences in a manner similar to the townscape movement. 43 His definition of form and position of the buildings as the key conceptual strategies to achieve "the difficult whole" was later extensively discussed in his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 44 The notion of context later became central to British-born American scholar Colin Rowe's Cornell studio teachings in the early 1960s. Here, Rowe developed a design theory and strategy based on understanding of context as the urban texture of built environments, best depicted through figure-ground Gestalt diagrams. In that vein, Giambattista Nolli's Nuovo Pianta, which showed civic and religious structures as successive urban spaces in white, while rendering housing and commercial structures as an urban poché in black, became the main paradigm for contextual design. Rowe proposed to design buildings as set-pieces, achieved through a collage of ideal types, which were composed and distorted according to their urban context. 45 In fact, a richer understanding of context can be found in Rowe's Texas years. Rowe taught at the University of Texas Austin between 1953 and 1956, together with, among others, Bernhard Hoesli, John Hejduk, and Robert Slutzky, who later became known as the Texas Rangers. During this period, Rowe and Slutzky wrote two essays introducing Kepes' Gestaltian definition of phenomenal transparency-"simultaneous perception of different spatial locations"-as distinct from the direct material condition of literal transparency. 46 Although they mostly explained their argument through façade analysis, they also introduced an analytical diagram of Le Corbusier's Palace of the League of Nations showing "spatial stratification" as the prime strategy for shaping the physical, visual, and perceptual context. 47 This multilayered context-debate of the 1950s and early 1960s was later submerged beneath the subsequent postmodern approaches of its protagonists. To mention a few, Colin Rowe became a subtle defender of liberalism with the influence of philosopher Karl Popper's advocacy of open societies against historicist and utopian social engineering. In his 1978 book, Collage City, written with Fred Koetter, Rowe introduced possible elements of an urbanistic collage-objets trouvés-where the neoclassical syntax was prioritised. Abandoning the programmatic and hence the social dimension of architecture, his contextual approach resulted in formal eclecticism and heterostyle in the 1970s, as his so-called draughtsman James Stirling's projects display. Robert Venturi established his own practice in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s, in which he was joined by Denise Scott Brown in 1967. Witnessing in these years a peak in modern liberalism in USA shaped by President Johnson's program for the "Great Society" and the concurrent escalation of the Vietnam War, Venturi justified his emerging pop approach by announcing ironically that pop architecture expresses the values of its society, which is directing its money and technology elsewhere such as the war industry. 48 His projects represented classical vocabularies with pop art techniques in order to communicate with the taste cultures of contemporary mass society. Social upheavals and student protests in 1968 led to the questioning of the discipline of architecture, especially in Italy. In this political climate, Aldo Rossi was searching for the basis for a "rational architecture", which was then interpreted as the catalogue of historical and traditional architectural forms. In his works after the 1970s, he de-territorialised and re-territorialised forms derived from a vast spectrum of collective and his own personal memory. Absorbed by postmodern historicism and eclecticism in the 1970s, context was later co-opted by conformists and traditionalists in the early 1980s as discussed in the previous section.

CONCLUSION
Today, context is either ignored or abused in contemporary architectural practice. Firstly, iconic structures designed as freestanding commoditised objects of global capitalism are pretending to disregard the physical, social, and cultural aspects of their urban contexts and feigning independence from the planning laws and financial constraints that shaped them. Secondly, context is abused by conservative politics promoting historical revivalist projects and by traditionalists aiming to achieve visually harmonious environments. In addition, theoretical and discursive reflections on context today are puny since there is a lack of interest among teachers, theoreticians, and architects. Therefore, it is necessary to reclaim the notion of context today as a critical generative tool in design. This can be achieved first by severing it from the blinkered understanding and formal-stylistic association it has gained over time. In other words, definition of contextualism as a reductive strategy complying with conservative politics by recirculating traditional and historical forms or conforming to visual aspects of surrounding built environments has to be altered. By contextualising context, the historiography presented above shows that architectural practice could be both critical and engaged, as the multilayered debate of the 1950s confirms. Hence, this argument presents context as a corrective to both the polemicists of architecture's autonomy and the evasive position adopted by the new pragmatists. In addition, the early context debate performed architecture as a prosthetic discourse connected to art, visual studies, philosophy, and so on. Emphasising the debate engendering architectural discourse as prosthesis, rather than endorsing strict definitions or design principles for contextual design practices, could enforce critical capacity of context. In the end, I call for generating a context debate wherever archaeology can establish a background, a horizon of meaning where it can (non-trivially) play out.