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. Its connotations have traditionally been linked with the humanities, in the sense of relating to human societies and to human form. To build in scale goes virtually without saying in the world of ‘polite’ architecture, but this is a precept observed more often in the breach when it comes to vast swathes of commercial and institutional design. The older, more particular, meaning in the humanities, pertaining to classical western culture, is where the sense of scale often resides in cultural production. Scale may be traced back, ultimately, to the discovery of musical harmonies, or it may reside in the arithmetic proportional relationship of the building to its parts. One might question the continued relevance of this understanding of scale in the global world of today. What, in other words, 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 And what does scale mean in a world where an intuitive, visual understanding is often undermined or superseded by other senses, or by hyper-reality?This book contains a selection of the best papers given at the 7th International AHRA Conference, hosted by CREAte (The Centre for Research in European Architecture) at the University of Kent, Canterbury. It includes an introduction which sets the scene in terms of current architectural discourse, and is organized in three thematic parts, each with an introduction by one of the co-editors.The chapters are grouped according to the following broad themes: Scale and the Post-Humanist Age, Scale in the Age of Digital Representation, and Scale and Globalisation.