Philosophy

New Contextualism is an approach to architecture and urban design originated by Mohammad Habib Reza, an architect, architectural historian and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Design, BRAC University, Dhaka (Reza 2025). Reports of its first public workshop describe it as a philosophy ‘coined by Mohammad Habib Reza’ that took shape at BRAC University over the course of a decade (BRAC University 2023; Arch-Bangla 2023).

In the founder’s own account, the approach grew from two sources. The first was practice. As an architect-planner for the Barisal City Corporation, working on area development projects such as the Bibir Pukur region and the Multipurpose City Market, he was confronted with the need to reconcile new interventions with existing urban fabric in a deltaic environment (Reza 2023b; Reza 2025). The second was research. His doctoral study of the early Buddhist architecture of Bengal, at sites such as Mahasthangarh and Wari-Bateshwar, revealed buildings shaped by climate, local materials, ritual and social organisation (Reza 2025).

The approach has since been developed through teaching. The founder describes encouraging students to undertake ‘a tenfold overlapping study of the broader context’ in his design studios (Reza 2023b), and his 2025 biography refers to numerous undergraduate thesis studios on the philosophy at BRAC University (Reza and Nitu 2025). Its public articulation can be traced through workshops, essays and symposia from 2023 onwards, set out in the chronology below. The 2025 essay in The Daily Star names a further stage, ‘New Contextualism 2.0’, with a more explicit integration of sustainability frameworks (Reza 2025).

Contextualism has a long history in architectural thought. In its classic form, associated with the urban design teaching of Colin Rowe and the arguments of Collage City (Rowe and Koetter 1978), it read the city as a figure–ground field of solids and voids into which new buildings should fit. Esin Komez Daglioglu’s survey of the ‘context debate’ traces how the idea developed in architectural discourse from the 1960s and how it later fell out of favour (Komez Daglioglu 2015).

New Contextualist writing acknowledges the value of that tradition but identifies its limit. Classic contextualism, Reza and Nitu argue, urged architects to echo the scale of neighbouring buildings, align rooflines and match materials, but ‘the movement often stopped at the surface’, leaving ‘deeper layers of culture, ecology, and history’ untouched (Reza and Nitu 2025).

The same critique is extended to the dominant paradigms of the twentieth century. Modernism, in the founder’s words, ‘often arrived in contexts like ours as an external imposition’, while Postmodernism ‘swung towards irony and surface quotation’ (Reza 2025). Placemaking ‘brought people back into the conversation’ but remained limited to small-scale interventions (Reza and Nitu 2025).

Against these positions, New Contextualism holds that context ‘transcends the immediate physical site’ (Reza 2025). It is not only what surrounds a building, but the social, economic, political, historical, ecological, scientific, geographical, cultural, urban and architectural conditions through which a place is made.

If context is not limited to the site, where does it begin and end? The founder’s 2023 essay describes a sequence of scales: context ‘starts from the space’s universal values, extends to regional ideas aligned with critical regionalism, and encompasses the immediate neighbourhood and site boundaries’, with each examined through its past and its developmental trends (Reza 2023b).

This places New Contextualism in conversation with critical regionalism, which sought an architecture capable of mediating between universal civilisation and the particularities of place (Frampton 1983). The founder locates the approach within the discourse of contextualism and critical regionalism, naming Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks and Kenneth Frampton, while placing ‘greater emphasis on sustainability and community-oriented design’, as championed by Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl and Bjarke Ingels (Reza 2023b).

The relationship between the universal and the particular is described as hybridisation. New Contextualism ‘embraces this global knowledge but insists on its critical adaptation to the specificities of the local’, rejecting the wholesale importation of ‘International Styles’ as firmly as parochial isolationism (Reza 2025). Heritage, in this view, is ‘not a static relic to be cordoned off or merely replicated’ but ‘a vital, living continuum’ that should actively inform contemporary design: ‘building upon legacy, not just beside it’ (Reza 2025).

The most explicit statement of the framework appears in the founder’s 2025 essay, which describes ‘a tenfold overlapping analysis’ of context (Reza 2025). The ten dimensions, with the terms the essay uses to characterise each, are listed below.

The purpose of the matrix is practical: it ‘prevents the imposition of predetermined solutions and fosters locally attuned responses’ (Reza 2025). Not every dimension carries equal weight in every project, since the framework’s principles and layers stay constant and ‘only the answers change with place’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). Published case studies foreground different layers: spiritual, historical, cultural and social conditions in one thesis; ecological, social, political and urban conditions in another (Reza and Nitu 2025).

The formulation has varied over time. The 2023 essay lists the same ten facets without definitions (Reza 2023b). The September 2025 essay names the ten layers among its principles, but its ‘10-layer lens’ lists a spiritual layer in place of the political and calls the scientific layer ‘Scientific/Technological’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). This platform follows the April 2025 formulation and uses the name ‘Scientific and Technological’ for the sixth dimension, pending confirmation of the definitive version by the founder.

New Contextualism treats context not as a fixed backdrop but as ‘a living, layered, and evolving fabric’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). Its dimensions overlap: a canal is at once an ecological system, a piece of urban infrastructure and an object of political contest; a pilgrimage site is simultaneously spiritual, cultural, social and economic.

Time is central to this view. The approach is described as ‘intrinsically forward-looking, yet profoundly anchored in an understanding of the past’ (Reza 2025), and as a framework able to operate across time (past, present and future), scope (from ecology to culture) and scale (from building to city) (Reza and Nitu 2025). ‘The primary focus in architecture and urban design must be designing for the future, not the present’, the founder writes, while acknowledging that ‘the future cannot be predicted completely’ (Reza 2023b).

Because conditions change, buildings and settlements are to be designed ‘not as static objects, but as adaptable systems’, able to accommodate future changes in use, technology and environment (Reza 2025).

The published texts describe the dimensions as overlapping but do not specify how each relates to the others. The relationship map below and in the Framework section is therefore an editorial interpretation. It proposes the most direct relations between dimensions and, where possible, illustrates them with examples from the published record. It is offered for discussion, not as part of the founder’s framework.

In practice, New Contextualism is presented as a process before it is a form. Every project is said to begin with three phases, Read, Plan and Process, with particular weight given to the first: ‘Before form or function, it is necessary to understand the context’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). The ten dimensions give that reading its structure.

The published record of applications consists mainly of academic design proposals: undergraduate theses, studio projects and competition entries. They include a thesis that reimagines a pilgrimage site at Panatirtha, Sunamganj, as a civic landscape, and another that frames Dhaka’s neglected Kallyanpur canal as a civic spine within a transit-oriented development (Reza and Nitu 2025); a proposal for the regeneration of Old Dhaka’s Chawk Bazar through phased intervention and adaptive reuse; a conceptual proposal for an Islamic fortress complex in Spain; and a community-based tourism proposal for a village known for its Alpana art (Reza 2025). These are conceptual proposals, not built works. Each is documented in the Projects section with its sources.

The April 2025 essay extends the approach through four areas of emphasis: nature-inspired design, deep sustainability integration, alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and proactive resilience (Reza 2025; United Nations General Assembly 2015).

As a philosophy still in development, New Contextualism invites critical examination, and its own public events have made room for it. The 2023 workshop included a lecture on the possibilities and challenges of the approach, which ‘critically analysed the ten key parameters’ and identified those with more scope for development (BRAC University 2023; Bhuiyan 2023). The 2024 workshop programme likewise announced discussion of ‘New Contextualism’s potential and limitations’ (Context BD 2024). The questions below are offered in that spirit, as editorial commentary rather than settled positions.

Weighting the dimensions. The published texts state that not every layer carries equal weight in each project, but they do not yet set out how weights are determined, or by whom. A transparent method for weighting dimensions, and for resolving conflicts between them, would strengthen the framework’s claim to be replicable.

Prediction and its limits. The approach places considerable trust in prediction, including big data and AI. Its texts qualify this: such tools are to be used responsibly (Reza and Nitu 2025), and their accuracy depends on an understanding of historical precedent (Reza 2025). Questions of data access, bias and accountability, particularly in the Global South, remain open.

Stability of the framework. The dimensions and principles have been formulated in slightly different ways across publications (see section 04). A definitive, citable statement approved by the originator would help others apply and critique the framework consistently.

Evidence from practice. The documented applications are, so far, academic and conceptual proposals. Built work, post-occupancy evaluation and comparative studies would allow the approach’s claims about equity, resilience and belonging to be tested.

Relation to earlier theory. New Contextualism presents itself as process-based rather than style-based, drawing on Modernism, Postmodernism and critical regionalism ‘in a more nurtured and advanced manner’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). Careful comparison with that literature is a promising line of research. One example is participatory economic planning, which the September 2025 essay suggests critical regionalism rarely includes.

Future directions. The founder’s writing anticipates further development through New Contextualism 2.0 (Reza 2025), and the 2023 essay was presented as a summary of a forthcoming article for a book dedicated to the philosophy (Reza 2023b).

The bibliography lists every source cited on this page. Primary texts of New Contextualism come first, followed by works cited in those texts, an editorial selection of further reading, and the documentary sources used for factual statements. Records in the New Contextualism archive can be explored, with filters, in the Research section.