Buildings

摘要

This issue we consider, in various ways, what context means when designing a building. In the case of the new ₤140m Macallan distillery and visitor centre by Rogers Stirk Harbour (P20), it is the landscape of Speyside and the man-made interventions that help shape it. When it comes to the Nucleus archive centre for the British nuclear industry outside Wick in Caithness by Reiach and Hall (P14), it's the same contextual stimulus - but very different surroundings. For Niall McLaughlin, his Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre at Worcester College Oxford (P26) is all about the tradition of the pavilion in the park - and also the need to respond to the challenge set by earlier architects, notably Richard MacCormac's early 1980s Sainsbury building. Do we struggle to detect the context for Zaha Hadid Architects' Morpheus resort in Macau, China (P32)? Not at all: it fits right into its cityscape of similarly sized towers and slabs, standing out by virtue of taking inspiration from Chinese jade carving. Or that's the story, anyway. Take a look, be as sceptical as you like: the point is that architecture craves context, will always find a way to respond to it, and will create it if it does not exist.