I have often tried to condense a booklength
topic into a single monthly column,
but I have never tackled one quite
so daunting as "scale." Yet nothing is
more basic to design.
All the different definitions of scale
have something to do with relating the
apparent size of a building with the real
size of a human being. This is important
because people find it disturbing if they
discover that a building is not the size
they thought it was.
For example, you can't make a large
house cozy by reducing everything by
half: it just becomes a big dollhouse.
Conversely, you can't create a sense of
awe by doubling the size of everything
in a building