The human ladder

In the rush to find immediate comfort or to indulge in apparent success, we lose scale and importance. We are suffocated by size and quantitative abundance. We are victims of an obedient behavior carefully induced by the over-saturation of consumer goods. Architecture today is becoming a commodity.

Alienating doctrines and depersonalizing generalizations darken our horizon. All this is made and claimed by the so-called progress of the 21st century. But we have seen in recent decades that it translates into urban encroachment, resource depletion, the decline of some communities and the rise of corporate rule. The architect has - in this context - another platform for intervention. He must be an excellent integrator and act as a curator of the changing world.

Consumer society indoctrinates us to believe that size matters. We are forced to believe that we must have more. We are forced to admire size and see invasive expansion as synonymous with growth, any growth.

All of this and its pace of invasion is suffocating us. One of the optimistic answers to this avalanche of problems is human scale. Why? Whatever technologies, tools and gadgets surround the human body, its dimensions and the way we perceive it visually contain constant elements. For architecture, design and, on a larger scale, urban planning, the theme of the human scale contains fascinating iterations. That is why we propose in this issue a thematic dossier that visits the theme of the human staircase in architecture. More specifically, it proposes a type of discourse that validates stable elements. Correctly questioning the dimensions that count in a seemingly uncontroversial change generates an element of stability. We so badly need balance. We want to show in the content of this issue that questions such as: what do we relate to; how do we interact; in what context - which are natural to every project theme - become by human scale less vast. We have a fulcrum.

I remember with great pleasure the composition courses of prof. arh. Anton Dâmboianu at the "Ion Mincu" Institute in Bucharest, in which GOLD - the human action of reference - was an essential component of any composition. Through the fundamentally human elements, a series of anxieties about starting a project and the questions "with what do we measure our space?"; "what must space be like?" become, through the human scale, less vast. In the human scale we always have a fulcrum.

Without being architects, each of us feels space. Without the need to measure, we have an open perception of proportions. Without knowing it, we are comfortable in a certain place. Perhaps that's why we all had our first contact with a welcoming but mysterious space as children, hiding under the table. The protected, covered place that partly or totally covered us had magical qualities - it was all-encompassing. This is how we were introduced to the human scale. In the key to reading this experience, human scale means simultaneously sensing the qualities of a space and adding - consciously or instinctively - a narrative or mnemonic relational element. The imagination of each of us cuts out the place under the table from the physical context of the home and transposes it into a world of stories. The human scale includes three-dimensional qualities, but also narrative qualities in the evoked work register.

"Only architecture that takes into account the human scale and the interactions that take place on that scale is successful architecture," says Jan Gehl, the fascinating main character in the documentary The Human Scale.