Hvad vejer vækst?

Abstract

Theories with emphasis on issues of proportionality have played a dominant role in the history of art and architecture and have thus contributed to our difficulty in recognising the consequences of growth: Leon Battista Alberti argued it was essential that a large and a small shape be proportioned identically and saw it as an advantage that actual size has no significance for proportions. Alberti’s considerations about what characterises a beautiful – well-proportioned – form can thus be linked to contemporary computer-generated architecture that effortlessly can be scaled up and down at a turn of the zoom button. In the computer, everything is scalable. But that is not the case in reality, where everything changes with size and a cube that on each side is 10 times larger than a smaller one is not 10, but 1,000 times heavier. The article embarks on the discussion of what it means to see the importance of size – and thus scale – in the world we inhabit and which seems to suffer because we ignore many heavy consequences of growth.