164 ORGANIZATION
The rule of thirds. (a) Less than one-third woodland in this scene looks uneasy. (b) A 50:50 split also looks uncomfortable: neither element is dominant. (c) One-third woodland to two-thirds open ground below looks a better proportion.
is somewhere in-between, implying that there is a gradation of scale from valley bottom to hill top. This has important implications for design, since small elements will tend to look out of scale if they are located at the higher, bigger parts of the landscape where large elements will be in scale. Care is therefore needed to ensure that the scale of the landscape is taken into account during design. This is not easy to do unless the scale of all the viewpoints in any landscape where landform is important is assessed. In other cases scale can be tested by using simple rules of thumb of distance from the observer versus height of object and by using interlock and enclosure to control it. Very large objects are difficult to fit into any but the largest-scale landscapes. For example, large power stations tend to dwarf everything around them. However, we need human-sized objects to be near them in order to register scale. If the design is kept simple and all the lower-level detail, which would enable us