Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

5On Scale and Form

‘He entered into a miniature world and right away images began to abound, then grow, then escape. Large issues from small … thanks to liberation from all obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a special characteristic of the activity of the imagination.’

Dictionnaire de botanique chrétienne, 1851¹

The city is made up of lumps of built material which come together to enclose space, inside and out. Each of these lumps, which sometimes touch one another, has both a footprint, its shape and size in the horizontal dimension, and a height in the vertical. If we walk from one end of a block to the other – be it an urban block or a building – without seeing a change, a break, or an opportunity to turn right or left, we ask whether it is over-scaled, or lacking in human scale; we may wonder where we are, or begin to feel lost; it may make us feel small. We perceive a building through our own movement; but even when standing still, our eyes travel its surface, gauging its scale and discerning distances and differences, even the slightest irregularity being something quite distinct from that which is entirely regular.

The Bank of England, Prince’s Street, City of London, 2014A large impenetrable urban block; a hindrance to movement.

On Footprint

To quote the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl, ‘Homo sapiens is a linear, frontal, horizontally orientated, upright mammal’. ...