The perspective from the air is not a very good judgement of how a place feels on the ground because the most important signals (how the buildings interact with and frame the street) are lost when viewed from afar. Good cities and buildings are designed from the perspective where they should be experienced.



This is one area where technology has the potential to help us. 3D computer aided design in theory allows architects and urban planners to visualize their work from any angle, and professionals do take advantage of these tools, but often it doesn’t translate to real attention paid to the view as experienced by a person on foot. I suspect if we saw how their projects really would look, they would have a harder time selling them to the community and investors.

The perspective from which we design a place is where we end up putting the most attention to detail and where that place is best experienced. If we design from a helicopter perspective, the place will be best experienced via helicopter (which very few people have the opportunity to do). If we design from street level, the place will be best experienced from the street. Here are those ‘gray blobs’ on foot: