Principles of Design - Scale
Renaissance humanists claimed that man is the measure of all things. Whether you agree with them or not, you can't escape the reality that we judge the size of everything around us by comparing them with our bodies. I am 5' 8'' and a lot of men see me as short, but I see them as tall. They measure me against their bodies and I measure them against my body. Our sense of scale isn't identical, but we both have a human sense of scale - man as the measure of all things.
As children we live in a world where most things are scaled for adults. I can remember standing on tiptoes to see over the counter at a local fast food joint. I have a child's wicker chair that belonged to my mother and I can remember sitting in that chair, even though I can barely remember what my sense of scale was like at that age.
This seems like a good time to point out the difference between scale and proportions. Clarice T. Wilson did and excellent job of this in her book "Art Principles of Flower Arrangement", when she stated that both scale and proportion "have to do with pleasing size, but scale is the relationship of the different parts that make up the whole. Proportion has to do with the pleasing size relationships of areas or spaces that these different parts occupy.
In other words, a chair may be in scale with the body of a child or an adult and we may find the proportions of that chair pleasing or not. One person may that the tall back of a chair is out of proportion with the rest of chair and another person may find the proportions pleasing, regardless of whether the chair is scaled for a child or an adult. We may also decide that an overstuffed chair is too large for a room, even though we find the proportions of the chair aesthetically pleasing and it is the perfect sized chair for our body - it is too large because it is out of scale for the room that we have placed it in.
In this series I have been relating floral design to garden design. Floral designs are usually displayed indoors and are closely related to interior design. Just as a chair can be out of scale with a room, a floral design should be designed for the room that it will occupy - a small design for an intimate space and larger designs for larger spaces.
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