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
