LOOKING AT
BUILDINGS
Fitting Dormers to Buildings, and
Other Problems of Scale by Paul Hanke
Architects are often criticized for not
knowing enough about how buildings
are built. Builders, on the other hand,
are often criticized for having little aesthetic
sense.
In an effort to address the second
problem, I would like to expand upon
some comments I made last month
about those ugly long shed dormers we
too often see. The problem, I wrote, is
that they are too big for the buildings
they rest on, and therefore end up looking
like phony second stories instead of
dormers. To understand why that
happens, we have to understand scale.
When we talk about whether buildings
or their parts are