Context sensitive design

The problem of context sensitive design : How should a development project relate to its context?

Let us start with a dilemma. A rich Australian businessman has purchased a farm on a hill, near a European capital city. He wants to endow a church and residential centre for a new religious sect, to have the buildings designed by a famous architect and to surround them with a Eucalyptus forest, to remind him of New South Wales . He believes there is a local need for the development and that it will be a visual triumph, because of the glorious site and the anticipated harmony between the blue-grey foliage of the Eucalyptus and the polished steel of the architecture. Local residents furiously oppose the scheme. They want the farmland to be retained and prefer local materials to stainless steel. Conservation groups like the idea of a new forest but oppose the choice of species and buildings' architectural style. Architects believe the church design will be an important land mark in the history of their art, deserving a magnificent location. Tourism planners believe the church will attract visitors from afar. Other issues raise similar problems:

• -Should new reservoirs be designed to look like natural lakes? [Fig 3.1]
• -Should urban rivers be designed to resemble natural rivers?
• -Should new buildings in urban areas be designed to resemble their neighbours? [Fig 3.2] & [Fig 3.3] & [Fig 3.4]
• -Should the 'traditional' character of rural buildings be used to inspire new buildings? [Fig 3.5]
• -Should road embankments be designed as farmland or as wildlife habitats? [Fig 3.6]
• -Are some sites specially suited to dramatic and monumental structures?
• -Should new forests be planted with indigenous species, to resemble native forests?
• -Should bridges be designed according to purely functional criteria, or should some be 'traditional' and others 'modern'?
• -Should residential areas near public open spaces have a higher population density than areas distant from public open space? -Should mineral workings be concealed, or should they be designed to create spectacular cliff scenery?

-What aesthetic and ecological criteria should influence the design of new roads? These questions have multiple dimensions: administrative, aesthetic, ecological, historical, cultural, recreational, financial, climatic, hygienic, legal, and so forth. But a great question of public policy looms above them: WHEN should society intervene? It might be assumed that:

• -publicly financed projects are bound to be in the public interest, so they require no regulation
• -privately financed projects are bound to be for private gain, so they require maximum regulation

The twentieth century has proved the falsity of these assumptions. Anyone who contemplates the outrageously expensive environmental damage which public river and drainage authorities have done to every city in the industrialised world must tremble to recollect that the assumption was ever possible. Public and private projects can be good or bad in environmental terms. So let us ask: WHEN should the public intervene? HOW should the intervention take place? WHAT should be achieved by intervention? These questions will be addressed in turn.