The research used a two-level method with several steps to identify the role of site context in enhancing architectural concept using an interactive architectural approach.
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From previous studies and design strategies conducting six strategies that combine the site context with an interactive architectural approach.
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Analysing each strategy in detail to conduct the scheme and four methods of applying it.
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Choosing the case study involves 12 projects of three iconic architects (Eisenman, Koolhaas, Hadid).
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The first level of the research method is about graphically analyzing cases in three levels: surrounding context, site context with building, and building form.
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The second level of the research method is about measuring the method of interactive site context strategies used in cases.
Graphical analysis is about the redrawing of cases and analyzing them in three levels. first is drawing the context in the project site including lines of project form and landscapes, then comparing the site context with the project surrounding context. This is to identify if the site context is Ignoring or supporting the surrounding Context. The second level of analysis is about redrawing the in-site lines including lines of project form and landscape, then comparing the project form with the landscape on the site. This is to identify if the project form supports or ignores the site context. The third level is about analyzing the form of the project itself to identify if the project form is an absolute form or a result of extracted lines in the site context.
4. Interactive Strategies of Site Context.
From previous studies and design processes offered by designers of available projects, this study extracted the main interactive strategies of site context.
4.1. Objective Background Context
Le Corbusier stated that there is nothing more elegant than the pure line of viaducts in a geographically varied site. Context has been perceived like an endless given background that could be objectively described, measured and transformed. On that time geometry was superimposed on the organic in a perfect aesthetic balance (Russi, 2017). The erasing of hierarchies between object and its background overturned the meaning of the project and its capacity to intervene on the contemporary space, even in the built architecture. Vacuum is perceived as a spatial condition which belonged to artificiality equal to the fullness. Junya Ishigami stated that, my work is about the exploring the atmospheric qualities of transparency trying to push boundaries of architecture over its limits as shown in Fig. 1 (Russi, 2017). The effect of an architecture is conceived itself always in opposition to its background. In this strategy, building in contrast with its build surrounding and the site context has weak impact on the building as shown in Fig. 2.
3.2. Artificial Environment
Rem Koolhaas stated that the absence of architecture is not only a preliminary condition but could also be the project’s outcome (OMA office, 2022). What has been conceived in OMA Melun Senart project was substantially different from all the others structural urban realized since then. OMA placed artifacts and context on the same plane to the point of constantly reversing the figure with its background as shown in Fig. 3 (Russi, 2017).
3.3. Historical Tracing
The pre-existing elements in the site influence the concept of design and the recovery of many places that can obtain new meanings. The necessity of protecting urban environment should base on the protection of historical heritages (Talento et al., 2020). Mapping a site over a series of significant stages in the course of its history provides a description of the life and memory of a place. Historical tracing can be achieved by overlaying a range of same-scale maps from the same site, each one depicting a different stage of the site’s development. Doing so allows all the maps to be read concurrently and produces an image of the site that captures both its past and present. Historical tracing can provide important triggers for a design idea. There may be a historic route, path, road or railway line that could suggest a significant axis, which could be acknowledged in a design idea. Similarly, remains of historical elements in the site could also be recognized in a new building proposal. Historical site analysis can provide inspiration for a contemporary idea that connects directly with past archaeology of a site (Farrelly, 2012). Historical site mapping can bring together all the significant developments in a site’s lifespan. This provides a ‘complete’ picture of the site, which can then be used as a source of inspiration for future concepts.
In Long Beach, Eisenman begins with duplication and appropriation of fictional histories and the superposition of features real and allegorical onto a site. These histories concern land division, previous uses, and urban plans related to the specific Long Beach site. This strategy of superposition follows a story about a two-hundred-year condition that records a past Gold Rush (1849), a recent present (1949, the year of the university’s founding), and an imagined future (2049) (Jasper, 2021). A second shift relates to site and is expressed in ground manipulations including fictive archaeologies, that is histories real but absent or immanent and thus potential. Eisenman notes that Cannaregio was his ‘first real site plan. This emergent awareness of, and concern with, site and traces real and fictional – absent from the Houses series which were conceived as groundless up to the late House X - becomes perhaps the signal characteristic of the decade’s long investigation. The impact of this shift is clear in his project for Long Beach (Jasper, 2021). There are approaches to encountering with the historical context, which they focus on the separation of new structures from the old ones, including boundary, materials, or methods (Naghavi & Mazaherian, 2019). Historical tracing strategy is shown in Fig. 5.
3.4. Topographical-Cultural Geometry
There are common approaches that attempt to represent the nostalgia of culture and tradition in relation to the context-oriented product with the people. There may also be design approaches that are consistent with the context not only in the physical properties of the environment but also in the social and economic components (Naghavi and Mazaherian, 2019). The idea behind this strategy is that the design process is derived from an analogous and textual reading of the project and the site. Several urban projects, from the Parc de la Villette to Elliptic City, proceed from abstract geometries that can be adapted to the geographical or cultural particularities of the sites in which they are located (Migayrou et al., 2014). Eisenman argues that his project is grounded in form-making due to its emphasis on ‘archaeology of site’, and also the broader cultural context of the project’s controversy of perceived social failure and architectural decadence. In Goldemberg’s ‘Notes on Rhythmic Affect’, Eisenman is quoted describing the process of composition for the building as an overlaying of ground conditions, combing the physical, analogue geometric topologies of the site as a matrix of trace conditions, as Eisenman asserts, ‘The City of Culture evolves from the superposition of three sets of traces. First, the plan of the medieval centre of Santiago is placed on the hillside site, which overlooks the city. Second, a Cartesian grid is laid over these medieval routes. Third, the topography of the hillside is allowed to distort the two flat geometries, thus generating a topological surface that superposes old and new in a simultaneous matrix.’’ Over these conditions of ground, another conceptual trace layer of the digital is added to the compositional matrix of the building as a part of the ‘archaeology of site. In this strategy building in harmony with its built surroundings (Kormoss, 2007). In the description of the House XIa Eisenman in turn introduces concepts of topological geometry dealing with the mathematical study of surfaces and forms which are non-metric, such as those in which the measured distances are impossible to described (Was, XXXX). Topographical-cultural geometry strategy is shown in Fig. 6.
3.5. Context Fragmentation
This strategy is against the site and losing the site identity. It about changing or losing the character of site. There should be contrast between the new and the old architectures but not continuity. It is because that they believe new buildings have to show their new features compared with the old ones. An example of Fragmentation of the site strategy is the project of Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Hrws of Europe (1998–2005) manifests the instability inherent in what seems to be a system, here a rational grid, and its potential for dissolution in time. It suggests that when a supposedly rational and ordered system grows too large and out of proportion to its intended purpose, it loses touch with human reason. It then begins to reveal the innate disturbances and potential for chaos in all systems of apparent order as shown in Fig. 7. The design begins from a rigid grid structure composed of 2,711 concrete pillars, or stelae, each 95 centimeters wide and 2.375 meters long, with heights varing from zero to 4 meters. The pillars are spaced 95 centimeters apart to allow only for individual passage through the grid. Each plane is determined by the intersections of the voids of the pillar grid and the gridlines of the larger context of Berlin. A slippage in the grid structure occurs, causing indeterminate spaces to develop. These spaces condense, narrow, and deepen to provide a multilayered experience from any point. Remaining intact, however, is the idea that the pillars extend between two undulating grids. The way these two systems interact describes a zone of instability between them. These instabilities, or irregularities, are superimposed on both the topography of the site and on the top plane of the field of concrete pillars. A perceptual and conceptual divergence between the topography of the ground and the top plane of the stelae is thus created. It denotes a difference in time. The monument’s registration of this difference makes for a place of loss and contemplation, elements of memory. In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since understanding the Holocaust is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience. In this context, there is no nostalgia, no memory of the past, only the living memory of the individual experience (Eisenman, 2022). Context fragmentation strategy is shown in Fig. 8.
3.6. Natural Context Integration
This Strategy is about coping a curtain shape from the site. Project form follows the shape of the site and response the site natural topography. This strategy is used in strong, high characterized sites. Guggenheim Helsinki Museum Competition, 2016 as shown in Fig. 9. Guggenheim museum buildings are typically iconic objects that act as magnets, both the prominent waterfront site and the building scale of Helsinki demand an urban architecture that generates a dialogue between the object, its context, and its users. To produce an experience rather than an iconic object, Eisenman extended and overlaid the two dominant grid structures of Helsinki on the north-south linear site. This creates a diagrammatic structural datum that serves as the basis for an overlay of functional volumes. These volumes produce a series of horizontal sections, which are fractured in such a way that there is no dominant formal order other than the directional shape of the site. This results in three scales of galleries, each determined by size, section, and the need for light, and various means of movement to and through them. Two exterior ramps link the museum to the city: one is a north-south linear axis that runs along the west side of the museum, linking the city to the parkland south of the site; the other is a girding circular ramp that links to the promenade and penetrates the building but does not allow for entry into it. The Guggenheim Helsinki is an agent of change: an experience building with multiple points of accessibility and a variety of uses that invite both city residents and tourists to interact with the waterfront building in the same ways they interact with the city itself. (Eisenman, 2022). Muge Riza defined context by taking into account Uniformity, Continuity, Juxtaposition, and Non-con-textual. In this way the paper states that a variety of relationships can be found in relation to the context but there should be a balance between context and contrast or else recognition of new and old structures is impossible; it would not harmonize itself with the natural changes of time, facilities, needs, requirements and conditions of the day. (Tripathi, 2021). Natural- context integration strategy is shown in Fig. 8.