for monumental effect. Buildings, statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale larger than life as a social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also larger than life. One extreme example is the Rodina (Motherland) statue in Volgograd. for aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb's John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei's work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. to serve automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a length of department store can perceive about 68 features; a driver passing the same frontage at can perceive about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage with bigger letters and fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1920. Weights and measures tend to reflect human scale, and many older systems of measurement featured units based directly on the dimensions of the body, such as the foot and the cubit. The metric system, which is based on precisely reproducible and measurable physical quantities such as the speed of light, still attempts to keep its base units within the range of human experience. Systems of natural units (such as Planck units) are useful in theoretical physics, but are not suitable for everyday purposes; because the SI units are defined in terms of constants of nature they can be thought of as natural units rescaled to human proportions. Quotes "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not". -- Protagoras
for monumental effect. Buildings, statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale larger than life as a social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also larger than life. One example is the Rodina (Motherland) statue in Volgograd. for aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb's John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei's work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. to serve automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a length of department store can perceive about 68 features; a driver passing the same frontage at can perceive about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage with bigger letters and fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1920. Weights and measures tend to reflect human scale, and many older systems of measurement featured units based directly on the dimensions of the body, such as the foot and the cubit. The metric system, which is based on precisely reproducible and measurable physical quantities such as the speed of light, still attempts to keep its base units within the range of human experience. Systems of natural units (such as Planck units) are useful in theoretical physics, but are not suitable for everyday purposes; because the SI units are defined in terms of constants of nature they can be thought of as natural units rescaled to human proportions. 
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extreme
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Quotes
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"Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are; and of things that are not, that they are not". -- Protagoras