Architectural Proportion from an Empirical Standpoint

Proportion has long been central to theories of design and architecture before its role was questioned in the mid-twentieth century. In spite of this scrutiny, no definitive conclusion has been reached on the question of how proportion affects experience of the built environment. Here, an architect and a scientist attack this question from an empirical standpoint. They argue that, as a starting point, it is important to understand under which conditions proportions are perceptible by the flesh-and-blood person who moves freely through the built environment and observes it under various distances and angles. The authors begin by surveying the work of two forerunners of empirical study of proportion: The Russian architect and educator Nikolai Ladovsky, whose “psychotechnical” approach was inspired by scientific psychology, and the Dutch architect Hans van der Laan, who developed the theory of plastic number concerned with proportions of three-dimensional objects, and whose approach was strikingly similar to scientific approaches. Following an analysis of informal studies by Ladovsky and Van der Laan, the authors examine implications of such studies for education in architecture and interior design, and then describe two approaches to investigating architectural proportion formally, by methods of sensory psychophysics.