Proportion has long been central to theories of design and architecture before its role was questioned in the mid-twentieth century. In spite of this scrutiny, no definitive conclusion has been reached on the question of how proportion affects experience of the built environment. Here, an architect and a scientist attack this question from an empirical standpoint. They argue that, as a starting point, it is important to understand under which conditions proportions are perceptible by the flesh-and-blood person who moves freely through the built environment and observes it under various distances and angles. The authors begin by surveying the work of two forerunners of empirical study of proportion: The Russian architect and educator Nikolai Ladovsky, whose “psychotechnical” approach was inspired by scientific psychology, and the Dutch architect Hans van der Laan, who developed the theory of plastic number concerned with proportions of three-dimensional objects, and whose approach was strikingly similar to scientific approaches. Following an analysis of informal studies by Ladovsky and Van der Laan, the authors examine implications of such studies for education in architecture and interior design, and then describe two approaches to investigating architectural proportion formally, by methods of sensory psychophysics.

中文翻译：

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从经验的角度看建筑比例

在 20 世纪中叶对其作用提出质疑之前，比例一直是设计和建筑理论的核心。尽管进行了这种审查，但对于比例如何影响建筑环境的体验的问题，还没有得出明确的结论。在这里，一位建筑师和一位科学家从经验的角度来回答这个问题。他们认为，作为一个起点，重要的是要了解在哪些条件下比例可以被有血有肉的人在建筑环境中自由移动并在各种距离和角度下观察它。作者首先调查了两位比例实证研究先驱的工作：俄罗斯建筑师和教育家尼古拉·拉多夫斯基，他的“心理技术”方法受到科学心理学的启发，还有荷兰建筑师汉斯·范德兰，他提出了与三维物体比例有关的可塑性数理论，其方法与科学方法惊人地相似。在对 Ladovsky 和 ​​Van der Laan 的非正式研究进行分析之后，作者考察了此类研究对建筑和室内设计教育的影响，然后描述了两种通过感官心理物理学方法正式研究建筑比例的方法.