David Leatherbarrow and Kenneth Frampton, ‘Human Scale’
Seminar with David Leatherbarrow and Kenneth Frampton on the topic ‘Human Scale or person~building~city~world’, as part of a series of talks on The Human Face of Architecture; hosted by Eric Parry Architects on 15 April 2026.
00:00:07 Eric Parry
00:04:26 David Leatherbarrow
00:31:13 Kenneth Frampton
00:39:42 Q&A
Synopsis: This talk will take as its point of departure a line from the stated aims of the Human Face of Architecture lecture series: “to address… the human scale in large-scale developments, and the role of public spaces in fostering interaction and identity.” The first step will be to distinguish scale from size in criticism, theory, and design. Next, a question will be asked about contemporary architecture: should considerations of scale today, when sizes are so out-sized, turn first to the human body as its determining measure? A commonplace of modern thought, being is being-situated, will be invoked to suggest that wider frames of reference may be more apposite than the body, and further that the terms of comparison, by which in and out of scale are determined, may not be only metric. Instead, might more qualitative ‘measures’ be equally relevant to the use of scale to rediscover architecture’s human face? Consideration of these basic questions will be followed a close reading of a relatively recent building in Saõ Paulo by Paolo Mendes da Rocha.
David Leatherbarrow is Emeritus Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania and Foreign Dean, Southeast University. Born in 1953 in the United States and educated in the US and England, he has lectured throughout the world and held guest professorships in Britain, Denmark, and China. Questions of how architecture appears, is perceived, and shapes topography direct his research. Among his thirteen books are Projecting Urbanity: architecture for and against the city (2023), Book of Ruins, with John Hunt (2022), Building Time: architecture, event, and experience (2020), Three Cultural Ecologies, with Richard Wesley (2018), Architecture Oriented Otherwise (2009), Topographical Stories (2004), Uncommon Ground (2000), and two books co-authored with Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture(2002) and On Weathering (1993). In 2020 he was awarded the Topaz Medallion, the highest award given by the AIA and ASCA for excellence in architectural education.
Kenneth Frampton was born in 1930 and trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. He has worked as an architect, an architectural historian and critic, and is now an Emeritus Professor at Columbia University, New York, where he taught for over fifty years. He has also taught at a number of other institutions, including the Royal College of Art, the ETH, the Berlage Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrissio. He is the author of numerous essays on modern and contemporary architecture and has served on many international juries for architectural awards and building commissions. In 2018 he was awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale. His publications include Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Studies in Tectonic Culture, Labour, Work and Architecture, A Genealogy of Modern Architecture, Le Corbusier, and others.
