//week eleven

reflection....when analysing architecture within its context one can be and should be quite critical of how well it is suited to its environment and surrounding urbanism. It is one thing for an architect to focus on the design of the building, but without having any focus on the surrounding urban landscape the architecture can only function on its own rather than being part of urbanity. Today in the lecture Peter Richards brought up the issue of architecture + architecture does not always = urbanism, this is due to the reasons mentioned above about how architecture needs to consider the surroundings for it to function within an urban context. I think that the Villa Savouy is a perfect example of designing without taking into consideration the context of which it is designed in and the client it was designed for.

Form follows function? or does function follow form??
Peter posed the above questions to us today in the lecture in terms of how the exterior of the building functions within its surroundings. He elaborated on the notion of form follows function and made us think more broadly interms of the urban environment and how the architecture functions within its context. He talked a lot about access points of buildings and how they relate to adjacent buildings and town services. In particular we saw examples of cities that lacked in efficient urban design, where parts of the community  backed onto public facilities and shops although they were completely blocked off from these necessities, as access points to these parts had been completely disregarded. I think that this kind of lack of consideration to the function of these large impacting shopping centres and the surrounding mobility of the city creates chaos and demotes urbanity. All the aspect that help create an urban environment such as; walkability, diversity, proximity, connectivity, accessibility and legibility all contribute to creating a functional community.

When planning has not been considered and architecture is just randomly placed within a site this kind of approach function follows form approach. In this approach the functional aspects such as mobility and street scape of a city seem to get lost and rarely work coherently. Although, one can argue the pro's and con's of planned form follows function cities, for example they can create abundance of open space where possible danger of buildings being placed anywhere without consideration of its surrounding context can occur. Although these highly planned cities, on the oposite spectrum, can also be high evolved and have thoroughly considered the mobility and the accessibility of its architecture and urban form.