Chapter 16 Site Analysis: Building Context

Thebuilt environment surrounding your site can influence design, provide interesting reactions, or be totally insignificant and better off ignored. Regardless of how you view the surrounding environment, you should always consider building context when you are making a site analysis. With a geo-located model, you can find and generate the buildings surrounding a site in several ways, regardless of how little or how much information you have to start.

The Pro J ec T Si T e

Imagine for a moment that you have been asked to design a structure on a lot near the very visible Golden Triangle Museum District in Denver. As a responsible designer, you want to address the context, but how do you address the critically famous and complex context at this site, which includes Michael Grave’s Geometric Central Library; the brand-new, sleek, minimalist Clyfford Still Museum; and Daniel Libeskind’s abstract extension to the art museum? How in the world would you even build something like the art museum extension in SketchUp? In this chapter, you will collect and build the context near the Golden Triangle Museum District in Denver (Figure 16.1).

To define the site, follow these steps:

1. Start a new model by opening SketchUp, or click on the File drop-down menu and select New.

2. Click the Add Location button on the Google toolbar to geo-locate the model.

3. Enter Denver Art Museum in the search bar and zoom out several clicks to locate the site, as shown in Figure 16.1.

4. Click the Select Region button.

5. Position the pins around the four city blocks that compose the site, as shown in Figure 16.2.

6. Click the Grab button to import the selected site.

7. Toggle the Google Earth Terrain off and add a proposed building mass on the southwest corner of the site, as shown in Figure 16.3.