The Use of Shape Grammar in Contextual Design

The term context has been frequently applied since the half of the 20 th century, however, the ideas behind this concept had existed for a long time before. Architectural design, through the contextualism theory, has recently become a way of understanding the temporal position in the world. Among all context—based important issues and values, aesthetic base values and discussions have been at large used in order to evaluate the new contextual objects via which true contextual consistency would have brought into design discussions. Contextualism, as it is well known, is a result of the desire to resolve and to develop the relation between the historical environment and the placement of new buildings within its historical surroundings. Hence, the harmony between existed object and the new coming would become significant in the process of creating an appropriate architectural design to a considerable extent.To this end, the architect/urban designer’s attitude in which she or he looks at the surrounding elements and exerts critical notions and potentials, needless to say, would play an absolutely essential role and definitely would be differed from one to another. In this paper, authors put an aim to come up with an architectural approach of design [Shape grammar] which is contextually adaptive in full and is also able to smooth the way of continuity of the environment minus of disregarding designer’s creativity. Shape grammar; in effect, is a method of thinking to architectural design as a process which is consisted of the interpretation of context as an accumulated cultural experience. Moreover, it can afford addressing the contemporary demands and functions, whilst it is down to its cultural history and especially building types in association with it. Not only is shape grammar valuable in generation of a series of new forms, but also it can be regarded as a tool to facilitate the analysis of an existed design process.This method has been examined in the process of designing an extension building for National Museum of Iran [Iran-e Bastan] as a case study by authors.

Keywords:

Contextual Design , Shape Grammar , National Museum of Iran , Extension