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Contextualism refers to an approach to urban planning, which considers the city in its totality. It also emphasizes on the role of social, cultural, geographical and historical influences on individual development, because of the increasing interest in understanding environment in post-modernist architecture. It is also the degree to which new architecture is sensitive to its site and location. It farther varies from building to building and place to place. Moreover, architecture in context is neither a brief attention nor a radical innovation; rather it is a strong and expressive visual relationship to the surroundings. Individual building is always seen first as a part of the whole. Creating places and spaces that enrich the lives of the people who use them is the foundation of architect’s work. Every building can and should engage in a dialogue with the history, beliefs and needs of a particular place and time. In fact, current architecture in metropolitans of Iran including Tehran has an attitude based on ignoring the environment and the context of projects, including climate, history, geography, culture, etc. This attitude leads contemporary architecture to a sort of chaos and disorder. It also brings about contemporary architecture to lose its distinctiveness, besides increasing tendency and willingness of young generation of architects to imitate foreign works and projects without any attempt to adjust them to the context and environment of local projects. It means that this attitude can face contemporary architecture with a serious danger and threat, which enjoys no identity and character. The aim of this paper is to elaborate how correct and effective designing approaches in contextual architectural design can be obtained in architectural studios in order to provide designing with a dialogue to their context and environment, to have more successful designing, and also to illustrate a clear vision for contemporary architecture. Design studios in Iran, where architectural design lessons are being taught, are the main and fundamental part of architectural education. Considering that most of undergraduate students in Iranian architectural departments are ignoring the context without paying attention to its influences in their designing, we are going to figure out how context can be reflected and used in architectural designs in this paper. For this purpose, architectural designs in 4 different studios including Educational space, Cinema, Hospital, and Residential Space in Sooreh University in two semesters during a year (2009-2010); were evaluated among 20 groups, which were divided into two controlled and uncontrolled units. The evaluation was based on 9 examinations, which the authors had already extracted from the architectural designing principles. It is worth mentioning that the only difference between those two units (controlled and uncontrolled) was the constructed site model that the controlled units could adjust and adapt their designing to. Final evaluation, which was the average score of each designing group in each examination, showed that controlled unit’s designing gathered higher score; consequently, their approach in designing was more successful and effective. It means that contextualized approaches in studios can improve architectural designing and result with architecture in context. In addition, professors at architectural departments should pay more attention to the context and environment and their role in designing process. They further should integrate their teaching with contextualism. To this end, they may utilize many innovative solutions including a model of the project site.

Keywords: Architectural designing training, Contextualism, context, environment, Designing patterns, Sooreh University

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