Analysis of Contemporary Theories When Encountering the Context in Architectural Design

From the beginning of the history of architecture, unconsciously or consciously, the issue of context has affected the architectural design. With the emergence of modern architecture, some theories were discussed about how to encounter the context in design and by criticizing those theories in the postmodern era and the advent of the Contextualism term in the architecture literature became a controversial topic among the thinkers of this field. This study has aimed at categorizing and analyzing the approaches to encountering the context in order to use it in design. In this descriptive-analytical study regard, using library references, an overview of the theoriststheorists’ approaches has been first mentioned in order to achieve a comprehensive classification . Then different theories about the critique of these approaches have been then investigated; and finally, these theories have been concluded and their fundamental points have been extracted and presented. The results indicate that while emphasizing principles including these principles can be summarized in three items of avoiding excess and negligence, simultaneous attention to the historical context and contemporary context, as well as the maintenance of integrity and continuity, the investigated theories support the contextualism.