Scale seems to be such a commonplace in an architect's armoury that it is very much taken for granted. And yet, if you are an architect, cast your mind back to your first week at architecture school, when you were turning that much-calibrated tool, the scale rule, in your hands, as if it were part of some masonic ritual. Or, if you never trained as an architect, you might have pondered the inscrutability of statements concerning a design being ‘in scale’ with its particular context. Scale seems to be more pertinent to the plastic arts, so that the intentional ordinariness of the embracing lovers in The Meeting Point (Paul Day, 2007) beneath the clock at St Pancras Station, London becomes banal owing to the giant size of the sculpture.
In terms of buildings and sites, scale is crucial in providing the right setting, physically and psychologically, for human encounter and well-being. In a landscape such as that of the Palace of Versailles, there are spaces of both intimacy and grandeur – the Baroque seems particularly adept at accommodating people singly and en masse. And while the modern landscape has its moments of intimacy – the work of the Scandinavians Carl Theodor Sørenson (1893–1979) and Sven-Ingvar Andersson (b. 1927) comes to mind, not to mention that of Peter Aldington (b. 1933) closer to home – it is the sheer size of, say, West 8’s projects that typifies its oeuvre (Weilacher 1996; Treib 2002).
The ‘right scale’ was a recurring phrase we learned in architectural history, whether contemplating Bramante's Tempietto in Rome (‘correct’), Boullée's Newton Memorial (‘monumental’) or Speer's Germania Grosse Halle (‘grotesque’). It also used to be a fundamental building block of design education, so that books like Eugene Raskin's Architecturally Speaking (Raskin 1954) functioned as set texts for students, as useful adjuncts when it came to designing, as Banister Fletcher was when comparing scale relationships between the parts of a classical temple.
There have been two fundamental changes in our understanding of architectural scale over the last few decades. First, the growing medialisation of the discipline of architecture, as well as its popular reception, has meant that we have become distanced from actual size relationships. Whereas William Curtis's Le Corbusier: ideas and forms (Curtis 1986) analysed the Swiss architect in ‘real space’, Beatriz Colomina in Privacy and Publicity: modern architecture as mass media (Colomina 1994) saw Le Corbusier as a canny exploiter of the media of film and photography, spellbound by the image of (scaleless) architecture devoid of people. Second, the effect of the computer has been to minimise scale differences in the act of design (computer drawings may be scaled up or down with no increase or diminution of detail), and to distance the architectural object from the actual size of elements in its environment. In other words, it has tended to privilege architecture freed from site-contextual considerations.
These changes in architectural perception, reception and activity have been driven by social and technical ‘advances’, but have also been paralleled by new thinking in the arts and humanities. While the conference from which these selected papers derive had a plethora of sub-themes, such as ‘Scale, landscape and utopia’ or ‘Scale and the post-humanist age’, we have been far simpler in this collection. ‘Scale in art and perception’ comprises papers that deal primarily with non-architectural understandings of scale, whose authors also tend to come from other disciplines; it is book-ended by two sections that take a plainly chronological split in their dealings with architecture: ‘Scale before the twentieth century’ and ‘Scale in the twentieth century and beyond’. Our hope is that the more discursive – and extra-curricular – understandings of scale from the perspectives of the other arts, and from the disciplines associated with perception, will illuminate the contribution of the twentieth century to scale, and act as a watershed between it and the preceding centuries. Taken together, these sixteen chapters and three photo-essays offer a broad understanding of scale in relation to architecture, deepening the subject, and widening its scope.
One question present at the conference but rarely voiced explicitly – the big elephant in a diminutive room – was whether humans could provide the measure of design. This question relates to the dialectic of ‘polite’ architecture – the numinous church, the exquisite art gallery, the comfortable house for a discerning client – with its obverse, the frequently crass, mass-produced provision of dwelling units, factory sheds and office barracks. The dichotomy between the two modes of design has been with us forever; the difference with Modernism is that the values of mass production have been aestheticised to a greater extent. However, it seems that scale has tended to conform to rather simplistic characterisations, either side of the political and artistic debates pertaining to relative size, such that Mark Fisher sees the appropriation of large scale by powerful industrialists as necessarily detrimental to society, whereas Owen Hatherley views the redemptive power of the large-scale, planned environment as a largely unrealised aim of the Modernist project (Hatherley 2008: Fisher 2009).
Questions of scale tend to mirror similarly framed ones pertaining to the ‘real’, so that different sections of the intellectual and artistic spectrum will attach the epithet ‘real’ to opposite ends of the scale continuum. The architect and teacher Michael Benedikt has argued for a pragmatic ‘felt’ architecture, where human scale is a crucial determinant of a comfortable and meaningful environment (Benedikt 1987). This can seem like a rearguard action, an attempt to corral architecture within the safe confines of tradition, and yet it can act as a corrective to the ever-increasing size of buildings, and the alienation wrought by the growing difficulty of comprehending scale relationships between parts of buildings, and of one part of the built environment to another. This has real political and social traction in today's world of ever-increasing giganticism. However, it is not realistic merely to wish the virtual world away: it is an indisputable part of lived experience across the globe today, and has been a central aspect of Modernist aesthetics for a century now.
Hermann Muthesius's famous saying, that he designed ‘Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau’ (‘From the cushion to town-planning’), might be reversed today, so that the first term denoting the largest scale takes precedence. Indeed, ‘Vom Stadtplan zum Essbesteck’ (‘From town-plan to cutlery’) was how Christof Wieser put it, echoing the title of an exhibition on contemporary Swedish design held in Zurich in 1949 (Wieser 2008). Wieser identified the tendency towards small or large scale in architecture as a cyclical matter that lingers on today: the same issue of the Swiss journal that detailed Wieser's thesis also featured the Zollverein School of Management and Design at Essen, an enigmatic cube designed by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa 2003–6). It also looked back at MVRDV's Amsterdam housing block ‘Parkrand’ (2002–7), a massive ‘superblock’ that reiterates, in scale terms at least, the ‘supersize’ of housing developments such as Sheffield's Park Hill flats (1957–61) a generation earlier. When the architect Ralph Erskine designed a similar extent of public housing a decade later at Byker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969–75), the scale characteristics of the famous ‘housing wall’ were reversed, and inhabitants were able to identify their own dwellings within the superblock and neighbouring low-rise housing.
We are familiar with representations that are (usually) scaled down: drawings or models. Architect and teacher Paul Emmons reminds us of that absurdity: the fullsize map. This is one of Jorge Luis Borges's celebrated fictions, where he discusses a map ‘whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’ (Borges 1998). For Emmons, Borges's surreal map ‘helps us to understand the delirious condition of scale drawings gone awry that occurs in CAD where buildings are represented at “full scale”. (Emmons 2005: 227). The limitations of CAD, that it ‘forego[es] the senses to assume scale is solely in the mind’ is a reminder that phenomenologically based critiques and tactics have their place in architectural production (Emmons 2005: 232). This ludic attempt to locate scale between the twin poles of the real and the virtual is not new: in 1931, the Polish scientist Alfred Korzybski (Gubler 2008: 10, 27n; citing Korzybski 1973: 38) stated that ‘a map is not the territory’. In order to draw a distinction between the scaling apparatus (in architectural terms, the drawing or model) and the territory to be scaled, he went on, ‘If the ideal of the map could be correct, the map would include, at a smaller scale, a map of the map, a map of that map, and so on ad infinitum’. Jacques Gubler, author of a monograph on the work of the Swiss architect Jean Tschumi, draws on Korzybski's insights in identifying the technique of zooming, one borrowed from cinematography, finding it aptly descriptive of the scaling design processes in the twentieth century, from the time of the Neues Bauen onwards (Gubler 2008: 10). He asks:
[…] doesn't architecture proceed from an empirical model – one that nevertheless does not renounce the use of theoretical models? Euclidean geometry and its graphic emanation, perspective, constitute a theory of representation linking Vitruvius to Alberti and Piero de[lla] Francesca to CAD software.
(Gubler 2008: 10)
Has there been a similar swing in the size of books on architecture? As doorsteps go, S, M, L, XL (Koolhaas and Mau 1995) takes the biscuit, followed not far behind by MVRDV's KM3 (2005). (The penchant for long strings of letters to denote titles of books and magazines, or indeed firms of architects, is itself an index of burgeoning scale in the public reception of design practice.) Perhaps the size of countries is in inverse proportion to that of their books? Michael Benedikt not only made his argument succinctly, but also did so in a format that allows the book to be carried in a jacket pocket. Perhaps today's proliferation of internet images, where pictures come cheap, accounts for such publishing sensations, to use the word in its phenomenal sense. Having said that, the recent publishing ventures of the Architectural Association (Architectural Words), Routledge (Thinkers for Architects) and RIBA Publishing with the Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage (Twentieth Century Architects) represent a welcome return to the pocket-format paperback. This brings us to a consideration of the literature on architectural scale.
‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet … Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.
(Raskin 1954: 36, citing E.M. Forster's Collected Tales)
Primers for design students used to feature scale prominently: Eugene Raskin's Architecturally Speaking (1954) may still be found on our bookshelves. For Raskin, scale was one of those ubiquitous qualities of environment, belonging (with proportion and rhythm) to a humanist design vocabulary. This embedding of an understanding of scale within architectural design practice persisted through books such as Pierre von Meiss's Elements of Architecture (1990). Scale was dealt with from a practical perspective in Charles Moore's Dimensions: space, shape and scale in architecture (1976), but its coming of age in terms of contemporary theory and practice was marked by the publication of S, M, L, XL in 1995, where the lack of scale, particularly of places peripheral to traditional cultural centres, was celebrated (Augé 1995). Scale was covered, particularly in its architectural–historical context, in Richard Padovan's Proportion (1999), and also in Robert Tavernor's Smoot's Ear: the measure of humanity (2007), where competing systems of measurement, and their implications for scale, were discussed. What is telling is that where the metric system of measurements has been adopted, the commonly used measures remain uncannily close to the old ones based on the human frame: the metre, for instance, is to all intents and purposes an English yard. So even where great abstractions purportedly rule our observations of the world, we feel most comfortable with ones that have an intimate connection with the human body.
Metric truths are measures – human conceptions – stripped bare by reason. Evident in the ironic responses to the empire of science during the twentieth century is an expression of the need to connect directly with the mysteries that surround us, to reveal and associate with the anthropomorphic that is manifest in nature. This need will not be eradicated by science: balance demands that it will become more pronounced. Our bodies require a positive relation with the natural world, and measuring the world with and through our bodies is essential to civilized – human – existence. It is doubtful that the balance will be redressed quickly, though the obstinacy of the United States, and its regard for human liberty, may yet supply an antidote.
(Tavernor 2007: 189)
Tavernor calls upon the twentieth-century philosopher of pragmatism, Richard Rorty, for a simple poetic image to emphasise the point: ‘After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly's wing, you have transparency, but not beauty – formal structure without sensuous content’ (Tavernor 2007: 188–9, citing Rorty 1989: 152). In architectural terms, we find an analogy here with the approach of the Swiss architect Peter Märkli (b. 1953), who conceives of his work in terms of sculptural masses; he has collaborated with the figurative sculptor Hans Josephson, and his finished buildings show a clear debt to human figuration, with all that implies for scale relationships of part to part. An early project, for two single-family houses at Trübbach/Azmoos (1982), shows this trait most clearly:
Because the site is sloping we had a lengthy discussion about plinths. I didn't want to have a plinth, so I came up with an alternative – an illusion. The amphora-shaped columns of the terrace look like they're standing on a plinth because they taper towards the base. They're a little bit stocky because the massing is critical to the architectural expression. Without the columns, the main facade wouldn't work. It's about centring the mass within the facade.
(Mostafavi 2002: 64)
Increasingly, new digital media have forced critics and practitioners alike to re-examine scale. Hannah Higgins (2009) looked at a plethora of cultural manifestations of scale in The Grid Book, and it last featured implicitly in the second AHRA Critiques volume, From Models to Drawings: imagination and representation in architecture. Alberto Pérez-Gómez is sceptical of today's ubiquitous reliance on the computer in architectural representation, taking in all aspects from inception, design exploration, client meetings and construction information. For him, the process of creation prevalent in architecture today assumes that a conventional set of projections, at various scales from site to detail, adds up to a complete, objective idea of a building. It is this assumption of the ideal as real, a conceptual inversion with roots in early Western modernity, that constitutes the first stumbling block (Pérez-Gómez 2007: 12).
The rot set in with Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand's Précis des leçons d'architecture (1802–9). In many respects today's practitioners of parametrics reject scale, seeing it as an outdated, humanist measure of architecture: Patrick Schumacher from Zaha Hadid Architects is a good representative of this stream (Schumacher 2010). For him, and others, Pérez-Gómez's contention that ‘[p]erception is our primary form of knowing and does not exist apart from the a priori of the body's structure and its engagement in the world’ serves to deprive humans of autonomous agency and to limit creative activity in a world that is, after Nietzsche, ‘human, all too human’ (Pérez-Gómez 1983: 3; Nietzsche 1909).
This book is the seventh in the AHRA Critiques series. It seems to have moved a long way since the first volume, Critical Architecture. Its editors aimed to bring together the two – apparently – separate activities of design and criticism. The selection of papers in the present volume presumes no such split, as Scale: imagination, perception and practice in architecture continues to challenge the accepted meanings, uses and interpretations of the term ‘scale’.
The section ‘Scale before the twentieth century’ is preceded by a photo-essay on the scale considerations of a twenty-first-century design within a pre-modern context. Nathalie Rozencwajg and Michel da Costa Gonçalves of RARE architecture question the dichotomy between scale and complexity. Fragments of detail from a listed building undergoing conversion become leitmotifs of spatial organisation and facade design. The computer facilitates a continuum of scale, with ornament its smallest manifestation, and the building as a whole – its urban form – its largest.
This switch from micro to macro, from close observation of detail to summative rendering of an entire urban mass, is summarised by Gordana Fontana-Giusti in her chapter on Wenceslaus Hollar. This Bohemian engraver made his famous depictions of European cities in the seventeenth century and these were subsequently used and appreciated by polymaths such as Robert Hooke in England. The accuracy and calculation that went into the remaking of London after the Great Fire were indebted to Hollar's meticulous depictions. In what might have been subtitled ‘the best of times, the worst of times’ Adam Sharr compares and contrasts two cities of equal size: Norman Foster's project for Masdar and Jonathan Swift's fictional depiction of Mildendo. He uses Fred Dallmayr's ‘currency of equivalence’ to question the appropriateness of this architecture of scale correspondence, contrasted with the West's political and economic ‘superiority’ in its relationship with local, non-Western context (Macfie 2000).
Fascination with small-scale detail seems to be a central fact of the arts in the Victorian period; it serves as an index to the painter Richard Dadd's madness. Maddening detail, with all the fussiness of doilies and antimacassars, was surely what the Modernists were rebelling against. John Ruskin's two lessons on watching architecture, ‘at the larger scale a sense of breadth and mass, and at the smaller a closer reading of surface texture’, are incorporated in Stephen Kite’s scale reading, prescient about some of the scale tactics deployed by modern architects, in particular by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
The final chapter in this section is one that forms a bridge to the sections on perception, and the final section addressing scale since the twentieth century. Hilary Bryon traces the development of perspectival drawing, from its mutations at the hand of William Farish in the early nineteenth century to Auguste Choisy's rendering of axonometric space at the end of the century. It is well known that the development of the worm's-eye axonometric successfully combined tectonic understanding with plan organisation; what is demonstrated in this chapter is how the limitations of the conventional isometric or axonometric drawing were overcome in terms of human scale relationships, enabling us to imagine ourselves to be the ‘worm in the bud’, as Viola hides her female presence from Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
Nathalie de Vries precedes the next section with the photo-essay on her practice work with MVRDV architects. Working diagrammatically, she shows how an architectural scheme in a tabula rasa context can have internal logic, and make sense in material and experiential terms. Her understanding that scale does not merely reside in the visual is explored in the chapters that follow in this section, no less so than in Fay Zika’s chapter, ‘Colour scales’. The artist and critic David Batchelor's point the fact that ‘[a]nalogical colour is colour, digital colour is colours’ has profound implications for architects and their new working methods (Batchelor 2000: 105). Certainly, modern colours are actually constructed pointillistically, as arrays of discrete dots, and we frequently see buildings rendered, and perceived, as such: look at the coloured tiling on the entrance facade of Caruso St John's Museum of Childhood, London (2002–7), or the brightly coloured endgrain to the plywood fin mullions at Robbrecht en Daem's Bruges concert hall (1999–2002): as our eyes pan round, from an oblique monochrome view, we begin to see a candystripe ‘barcode’ effect. We seem to have returned to Goethe's ‘search for serial relationships in nature, emphasising border experiences’ (Watson 2010: 205). The sequence of differently coloured enfilade rooms in Goethe's town house at Weimar expresses this most succinctly.
We move from light to sound. Fiona Smyth’s chapter on the rediscovery of pre-Reformation music in the early twentieth century aligns with the scientific, quantitative investigations – both in the academy and in practice at large – of the architectural profession. There is a sense that twentieth-century architects were trying to get beyond the received wisdom of academic history, which saw the High Renaissance as its apotheosis, and return to the ‘purity’ inherent in earlier building: a kind of Pre-Raphaelite movement that found its expression in ‘pure’ music, devoid of the lush colours of romanticism.
Janet Sayers’s chapter on Adrian Stokes is a timely reminder of this Freudian art historian, who had a practical influence on British architecture. His aim – that architecture should offer ‘integrated bodily form to the ego’ – is still very much with us today, and has filtered into the mainstream of design. The influence of architect and theorist Dalibor Vesely (b. 1934) on a generation of students at Cambridge is testimony to the power of this strain of architectural humanism (Vesely 2004). Staying with the emotions, Helen Mallinson finds the current fad for the ‘parametric relation between objects’ problematic because ‘all objects are rendered the same’. Her chapter carefully differentiates the sublime from the beautiful, and the fact that objects are felt emotionally before they are understood intellectually.
Architects feel most comfortable with sculpture when it comes to considering art disciplines relating to buildings. Recent conceptual art, by virtue of its intimate relationship with place, has the power to question our assumptions about the size and shape of space. When we, the viewers, step into the frame, then human bodily scale is instantly at stake. Elise Noyez makes this point in her study of the work of Roman Ondák and Mel Bochner.
Where is the faculty of space located in the human being? Conventionally a visual matter, Peter-Willem Vermeersch and Ann Heylighen present their research team's findings of how blind designers work, and suggest that sighted architects could develop more multi-sensory work by adopting such practices. The kind of incremental design procedures suggested by Vermeersch find support from Richard Coyne in his chapter on scale adjustment. What is at issue here is not the striving for perfection; it is rather how to deal with the gritty imperfections that clients, sites and materials present.
The final section looks at a variety of architectural responses to scale in the twentieth century, preceded by Igea Troiani’s photo-essay linking the small-scale domesticity of her own house in Oxford with wider contemporary matters. The photos show a concern for ‘the everyday’ that equates the design to the anthropological turn in mid-twentieth-century Modernism, epitomised by the Team Ten Primer (Smithson 1962). This leads to Jonathan Foote’s disquisition on architects and their chairs, where the scale of construction evolves out of the pragmatic world of daily practice. Both chapters are instances of the pervasive influence the French philosopher of the everyday, Michel de Certeau (1925–86), continues to have on design thinking.
‘Halfway between the electron and the universe’ is a beautifully apt characterisation of where we need to locate ourselves. Here, Simon Richards examines the work of Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, and that of the Delos symposia he ran from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Doxiadis attempted to preserve the small – the ‘S’ of Rem Koolhaas's S, M, L, XL sequence – and he embedded it within his idea of global city networks. Twentieth-century architecture frequently finds this ‘S’ – the smallest, most intimate scale – battling for presence among monumental odds. Gerald Adler resuscitates John Summerson's ‘aedicule’, which he used for art-historical purposes in his 1940s essay ‘Heavenly mansions’, and applies it retrospectively as a spatial category to architecture in the latter half of the twentieth century. The focus, as it was with Summerson, is on churches, but the lessons are far wider. The scale possibilities inherent in mid-twentieth-century design are the subject of Michael Pike’s chapter on the Catalan architect José Antonio Coderch. This close reading reveals a ‘contextual’ architect before the term became widespread, alive to the particularities of Barcelona, as well as the wider international culture in which Coderch was steeped.
The final chapter by Michael J. Ostwald offers a disquisition on a particular episode in late Soviet design: the phenomenon of ‘paper architecture’. While the aedicule was advocated by Summerson as a humanising scaling device, the Russian architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin used scaled-down versions of Soviet state architecture for subversive effect, borrowing philosopher Jacques Rancière's (b. 1940) theories about visibility and power.