4 Scale
When a pedestrian on
the street feels overwhelmed
by the sheer bulk and size of
a structure one thing is cer
tain: it is not the pedestrian
who is “out of scale” – it is
the building. Many large
retail stores being built
today have just a single en
trance on a two story wall,
one hundred fifty feet long.
An established small town
retail block may, in contrast, have (in the
same one hundred fifty feet) four or five
stores at a scale that is consistent with the
pedestrians who pass by. Achieving a
“human scale” usually means avoiding
long, unbroken horizontal expanses, and
paying attention to how upper stories of
buildings relate to people on the street.