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
