When a pedestrian on the street feels overwhelmed by the sheer bulk and size of a structure one thing is certain: 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 entrance 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. Blank Walls “The dominant feature of the townscape is coming to be the blank wall. They have a message. They are a declaration of distrust of the city and its streets and the undesirables who might be on them. … The one good thing that can be said of them is that they are so awful anything else looks good by contrast. The best thing to do with blank walls is to do away with them, or, at the very least, to prevent their recurrence. An owner who lines his frontage with a blank wall not only deadens his part of the street; he breaks the continuity that is so vital for the rest of the street.”