‘Worlds in Miniature’: some reflections on scale and the microcosmic meaning of cabinets of curiosities

Extract

This paper springs from some reflections in the context of the design studio on the meaning of miniature representations (such as drawings or scaled models, for example), in art and architecture. In the pre-reflective understanding of the world which characterises direct human experience, the size of things is an integral and deeply meaningful aspect of their phenomenal reality. Our primary perception of the size of things is, of course, a function of our embodied condition and is inseparable from their essential nature. Things seem great or small to us from the point of view of our moving body and its ability to act upon and manipulate objects of that scale. A mountain is large, difficult to see all at once from close by, and requires a great physical effort to climb. The size of a doll's house provides us with a marvellous power to see and control the life within, a power which is one of the reasons why the miniature pervades our daydream world. The size of a bacterium makes it invisible to the naked eye and immune to the manipulation of our hand, and this condition endows it for us with a degree of mystery and unreality in our daily life. The phenomenon of size, like most things we perceive, is given to us as situated in our experiential world.