Built Form Impact Assessment Method of Description

Continuous change in contemporary cities heve produced an urban space tipollogically diverse, particulary in fast growing South-American countries. As a result, the straight contextual analysis, usually used to assess the degree of innovation/permanence of new buildings in urban settings becomes ineffective, for the simple reason that frequently it is virtually impossible to establish what the context dominance actually is. The method proposed in this paper takes the issue of tipological analysis from a systems approach. This is carried out by a series of procedures, such as: a) identifying buildings'constitutive parts, which can be done at any degree of detail, b) listing them according to their attributes of repertory and formal composition.,with this it is obtained a extensive catalogue of the entities taking part of the considered urban setting, from which the actual context can be depicted, c) listing each entity's participation in the landscape composition, or the role each one has in the landscape configuration. The software that operates the analysis does the rest, measuring the degree of innovation/permanence of each entity, in relation to the others, and defining what the context is made of.. From this, any inclusion/exclusion in the considered townscape is automatically evaluated in terms of impact on the pre-existing setting. The system can be used at any urban scale, as well as at the building scale