Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

Introduction

‘No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.’

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977¹

London from the air, 2012Big shapes: river, Roman roads and parks.

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, Centre Pompidou and Place Beaubourg, Paris, 1977 (photographed in 2012)Super-scaled machine meets fine-grain city: a fertile combination.

Allies and Morrison, Diwan Annex, Doha, 2013Irresistible to touch: drawn by hand, cut by machine.

This book is about scale as it is manifested in cities. The word ‘scale’ can be defined as the ‘experience of size’. The book explores scale in cities, in the spaces between buildings, in buildings themselves and in their details. It seeks to ask how scale in the cities we inhabit can make us feel at home in the world or alien from it; connected or disconnected. Scale in cities is both relative and absolute. ‘Getting the scale right’ – although it is impossible to define such a thing – is a fundamental part of ...