Context: guaranty of continuance of life in landscape; The evaluation of Provost’s design approach from Paris to London

The contextual approach in landscape design is capable to consider what is beyond the form and physical features of the context and acknowledge the context as a set of physical, historical and cultural factors. In contextual studies three main fields of physical and socio-cultural are discussable; in physical contextualism the elements of the study are not assessed and studied alone, but they are analyzed in a wider environmental context. The historicists consider the continuity of history as an important principle and they believe that if a society isolates itself from its past, it has ignored the past efforts done by man. The socio-cultural contextualists believe that the culture creates rules and reflects them in different ways such as forms. A superficial look to the concept of contextualism leads to a degradation in meaning according to the surrounding body, while contextualism has a profound meaning beyond coordination with the physical features. In Alain Provost’s projects the contextual ideas are formed beyond the physical features of the context. He considers the context as a historical event that have been affected by the social and cultural aspect of life and embodied in the project. In other words, the context in his projects appears as a combination of physical, historical and social elements. In case we confine his contextualism concepts to physical and historical features of the context, the Parc de la Courneuve and Thames Barrier Park are expected to be categorized in romantic English gardens, while the Parc de la Courneuve reminds the English landscaping with its bushes and in the Thames Barrier Park the geometric and square plan and the existing topiaries cannot be explained. In these mentioned parks the public memory, based on the culture and lifestyle of the people, has become a part of the context and shows Provost’s awareness in using the context that includes factors beyond the history and the physics in order to relate to the culture of the people. For the modern man the context includes the nature and history as well as ecological and technological factors which are correlated to the modern life. Provost acknowledges the context as a set of physical, historical, cultural and social factors in his comprehensive definition of the context. It is important to emphasize on what provides more satisfaction to people in consequence of the fact that landscape architecture is highly associated with people for its people-oriented characteristic. This paper discuses Provost’s contextual theory through an adaptive comparison of Parc de la Courneuve and Thames Barrier Park which were his first and last projects.