The site is a critical part of the design. The site gives context and understanding for the project and a place to begin to inform our design. This can be cultural, but also climatic in nature. The site gives context by its surroundings, climate, time, historical context, and other topics can begin to contextualize the site.

The site is the first thing that pushes back on the prompt. We need to consider design constraints and do this by using the prompt or client desires to begin limiting the design, this contextualizes the problem and allows for ideas to be found in the boundaries of these conditions and limits.

This is performed with pre-design, that qualities of the physical site should always be done with research or precedent studies or other information or characteristic finding work in pre-design as each informs the other.

However, where does the site end?

The site is a combination of a number of factors and should not be limited by the physical views or constraints of the site. These non-physical considerations are places that inspiration can be drawn from to create order or orientation within the site while maintain a reference to a larger architectural fabric.

Remember that there are climatic concerns, and the site has local conditions that designs need to respond to be a more complete design. Climate and weather also help to determine which species and types of plants that would be picked for vegetated roofs and walls, but also the the architecture itself.

These two things combined make the designed response. The designed response reflects the place that the project was designed for rather than attempting to be some universal answer to a very specific place and its environment.