Vol. 2 No. 18 (2025): Scales
«The city is like a great house, and the house in its turn a small city», wrote Leon Battista Alberti, echoed by Palladio. And yet, it is precisely the rejection of the idea of a direct correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm that we generally take as the beginning of the modern age: that is when Brunelleschi demonstrated to his fellow citizens that the wooden model of Santa Maria del Fiore and the church under construction were two different things, and that the size of the latter—the size, not the proportions—required, in order to be materially built, entirely original solutions that had never been conceived before.
In this issue of SRSA, we invite you to reflect on a question that architecture has always had to grapple with: the problem of scale. What role do scale-related factors play in construction processes? In what ways, and with what degrees of awareness, have these factors been conceptualized throughout history? To what extent have the ideas of theorists and treatise-writers been reflected in the practical work of architects? And—shifting our focus from the objects of study to the lenses through which we observe them—to what extent do variations in focus allow us to grasp different aspects of historical dynamics? Below are a few hints, that can be freely developed.
