Disney Concert Hall

One of the aspects of architecture that was pounded into me year after year during my formative years was the perpetually misunderstood notion of scale. Scale has many aspects to it, one of the most important being the relationship and proportion of adjacent volumes to each other. Over the years my sense of scale and proportion has been honed whilst practicing architecture as a design professional, and seeing the constructions emerge after working on scale models and drawings, often for years at a time, is one of the great joys of the profession.

As an architect, one of the benefits of having photography as a parallel endeavor, is seeing how it impacts and enhances my sense of scale. By virtue of “miniaturizing” a building onto a computer screen or a print, via the captured image, the proportion of the volumes are often distilled down to their essential, as these can now be perceived as a whole. I’m endlessly enamored with the idea of changing the perceived scale of a building with photography. Some buildings, such as the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall shown here, are easier to toy with then others when it comes to using photography to decontextualize their true scale – it’s not hard to see why.