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Abstract

Abstract
The concept of contextualism associated with the current architectural trends and it gained a positive value in the presentations and practices of post-modern stage as an tool for establishing a kind of mutual dialogue between architecture and the existing setting in town as a reaction towards modernism problems related with the loss of communication feature amongst architectural products. The research discusses the importance of this concept to explore the research problem represented by unclarity of particularity of practicing contextualism in university buildings. University buildings, are characterized by the variation of design practices in their different time periods, leading to dis-communication in the expressive languages. So, the research problem was crystallized and its method and objective were identified represented by the construction of a theoretical framework that includes three main items; namely, intellectual attitude of the designer towards the existing settings, the nature of the contextual dialogue references and the mechanisms accomplishing the contextual dialogue. Then Mosul university campus was chosen as a field. The theoretical framework was applied on selected architectural projects for both categories; academic and practitioner architects in order to compare the contextual practice for those categories. The results showed that the two categories are variant concerning the derivation of context as a dialogue between the different architectural products in the university campus according to the their intellectual backgrounds.

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