Scale Imagination, Perception and Practice in Architecture

Scale is a word which underlies much of architectural and urban design practice, its history and theory, and its technology. This book considers what is culturally specific about scale? And what does scale mean in a world where an intuitive, visual understanding is often undermined or superseded by other senses, or by hyper-reality?

With a visual essay in each section, this book is for students, academics and practitioners in architecture and architectural theory as well as of interest to students in a range of other disciplines including art history and theory, geography, anthropology and landscape architecture.

Contributors:

Introduction Gerald Adler 1.

Scale Excursus 1: The Scale of the Detail, Natalie Rozencwaig

Part 1: Scale Before the Twentieth Century

The Role of Small-Scale Images by Wenceslaus Hollar: the Rebuiling of London in the Late Seventeenth Century, Gordana Fontana-Giusti

Mildendo and Masdar: A Tale of Two Cities, Adam Sharr

Examining the Knots…Counting the Bricks’: John Ruskin’s Innocent Eye, Stephen Kite

The Worm’s Eye as a Measure of Man: Axonometry in Architectural Representation, Hilary Bryon

Scale Excursus 2: Scale in Recent Projects by MVRDV, Natalie de Vries

Part 2: Scale in Art and Perception

Colour Scales, Fay Zika

Scales of Interaction: Aligning the Qualitative with the Quantitative in Music and Architecture, Fiona Smyth

Architectual Scale: Psychoanalysis and Adrian Stokes, Janet Sayers

Sublime Indifference, Helen Mallinson

Measuring Up: Measurement and the Redefinition of Scale in Conceptual Art, Elise Noyez

Scaling Haptics – Haptic Scaling: Studying Scale and Scaling in the Haptic Design Process of Two Architects who Lost their Sight, Peter-Willem Vermeersch and Ann Heylighen

Scale Adjustment in Architecture and Music, Richard Coyne

Scale Excursus 3: Complex Ordinariness in Oxford: 'House after Two years of Living', Igea Troiani

Part 3: Scale in the Twentieth Century

Ethos Logos Pathos: Architects and their Chairs, Jonathan Foote

‘Halfway between the Electron and the Universe’: Doxiadis and the Delos Symposia, Simon Richards

Little Boxes, Gerald Adler

Scale and Identity in the Housing Projects of Coderch, Michael Pike

Politics and the Deliquescence of Scale: the Columbaria of Brodsky and Utkin, Michael Ostwald