Thursday, November 20, 2008

Need: To see the whole and its boundaries

A Basic Need: People need to see something in its entirety. The need to see its extents and what fills those boundaries in one motion.
In Architecture: People be able to take in the entirety of a facade at one time.

For example: with a large building on a narrow street it may be kind to break the building into multiple facades so that it can be taken in in steps.

"A large building in a narrow street tends to be overwhelming, and it can never be seen as a whole. The solution adopted by the architect of 28 rue des Saints Peres in Paris was to divide his design into five narrow, distinct sections, held together compositionally by horizontal lines and a consistent formal vocabulary."

From P. 127 of Jean-Francois Gabriel's "Classical Architecture for the Twenty-First Century"

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