The concept of examining a site and then designing a structure around what we need it to do and how it will affect the surroundings is exactly what we avoid doing right now. I think that by employing a similar method to the one shown to us in class would allow us to build better cities because we could fit buildings in where we might not have been able to before. For example, a height restriction in city bylaws might prevent a high density building from being built, but were it to consider other structures and uses, it could be found to be appropriate and not to cause any one problems. This could potentially lead to much better incorporation of new structures into existing built environments. The responsible use of these techniques could theoretically negate many regulations that the city has on new structures and therefore get ride of a lot of arbitrary rules that are holding back a revival in this and many other places. As was brought up in class however, is the fact that this procedure is mainly a reactive one. It works amazingly well in a built environment where this structure is interacting with a lot of spaces that are already being uses and will have the same uses for some time to come. I think it would be much harder to use this method in a situation where we are trying to predict what the spaces surrounding the new structure will become over a long period of time. This process can be used for so many different applications and could be used to project into the future, but the question becomes how many levels of application are we willing and able to go through for each structure; how much can we really interpret into the future, and what is the value of this interpretation.
Scott Irvine.
