Dimensions: Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture

Dimensions and their architectural products - space, shape and scale - are essential concepts, the basic stuff of everyday design. Architect-authors Charles Moore and Gerald Allen feel that these terms are basically misunderstood among architects and laymen alike, and have written this important new book not only for architects who design new buildings, but also for all who want to learn to appreciate architecture and who must live their lives with what architects have built.

Dimensions, the authors show, are not just the familiar ones of height, width and depth which designers so often focus on, but in fact include any variable which can be changed without affecting any of the others. Thus the temperature in a room, or the amount of sunlight, or the color, or the psychic pleasure that they all create are all dimensions, too - and all of them must be the necessary concern of architect.

In concise opening essays, Allen and Moore describe space (that celebrated but often illusory product of architecture), shape (which carries the meaning of things) and scale (the relative size and importance of things) with a clarity that gives as good a definition of these abstract concepts as exists today. They then go on to a broad range of case studies, "walking tours" of individual buildings and places, which show how these concepts can be applied (and sometimes misapplied) in the man-made world.