AIRA
Project Context
Step one — the site, the statutory envelope, the environment, and the risks the design must respect.
Project Context establishes everything the design must respect before anyone proposes a room. It is the foundation the other two steps read, so time spent correcting it here is repaid twice over.
It covers the site and its parcel, the maximum buildable envelope, the environmental conditions, the statutory constraints, and the design drivers those imply.
The buildable envelope
This is the part most worth checking, because everything downstream is sized against it. It is computed from three inputs:
- The setback ring — the parcel boundary pulled in by the required setbacks on each edge.
- FAR × site area — the total floor area the plot is permitted.
- Height ÷ floor-to-floor — how many storeys that permitted height actually buys.
Tip
Because the envelope is arithmetic rather than a generated guess, correcting a wrong setback or FAR gives you an immediately correct envelope. You do not need to re-run anything to see it.
Reviewing the facts
Context comes back as a set of individual facts, each of which you can accept or correct on its own. A figure AIRA inferred and a figure you supplied are visually distinguished, so you can see at a glance which numbers are load-bearing assumptions and which are established.
Correct anything wrong before accepting. A wrong site area silently propagates into department areas and then into the whole programme.
No-build areas
Careful
Some no-build constraints are listed as text without coordinates. Those cannot be drawn on the site figure, and the legend distinguishes constraints that are drawn from ones that are only listed. A constraint that is listed but not drawn is still real — do not read an empty patch on the drawing as clear ground.