Size Does Matter. These words appeared in 1998 on enormous green banners hanging from Los Angeles’ Hotel Figueroa, a promotion for the upcoming Godzilla movie. At the time I thought it clever—pithy, even. Now, decades later, living in France, I find that this motto aptly explains why much architectural design in the United States differs from that in France. And as design influences behavior, that as well.

“The rooms are so small,” an American friend looking for a house on the continent recently commented. I chuckled as I offered that the closets—if there were any—would be, too. Here, armoires are still used for storage; this is consistent with buildings constructed well before the advent of consumerism. I remember moving back to California in 1990 and waking up in my friend’s dingbat apartment to gaze at his 8-foot wall of closets stuffed with clothes for the dual seasons of Southern California. This offered an immediate cultural contrast to the meter-wide closets of Paris, meant to suffice for all four seasons. 

The continental U.S. is about 3 million square miles in size and accommodates approximately 340 million people. France is just over 213,000 square miles (smaller than Texas) and holds a population of just over 68 million (more than twice the population of Texas). This produces a land-per-capita ratio of 113 people per square mile in the U.S. vs. 319 people per square mile in France. Many other European countries are even denser. Certainly, France’s concerted preservation of its long history when compared with that of the U.S. also explains the continuing prevalence of smaller rooms here, but this issue of size goes beyond the domicile. The simple reality is that when there is less space for more people on average, space is planned and designed differently. I now feel that reality through my daily experiences.

In numerous French towns and settlements, many of the streets are far narrower than even the most densely populated U.S. cities like New York, Boston, or San Francisco. Though widening of these streets has happened over time to increase traffic flow—whether it be Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris for the military, or the new access roads at the port area of Marseille for businesses and tourists—many of these changes are localized and intermittent to preserve not just the history of the place, but the precious area for buildings to house people and commerce. I have stumbled upon various instances where, when stuck in city traffic, a sudden reprieve on a wider, more flowing street occurred, only to learn that the relief was temporary, ending within a few blocks—a typical French tease. When there is less space, widening streets contiguously within cities is less of an option; this usually has been reserved for the outer industrial zones or newer developments where housing and, as I’ve previously noted, large-scale commercial projects have been planned alongside it. 

Thus, it is far better to park and walk. As Carcassonne was the inspiration for Louis Kahn’s traffic plan for the city center of Philadelphia, parking is usually at the perimeter of villages or a town’s “centre ville,” their narrow through-streets reserved mostly for residents and service vehicles. This reduces traffic speed to that of the pedestrian; raised crosswalks are common, supporting the legal right-of-way pedestrians have here at unsignalized crosswalks. Thus, everything slows down in these places; size and scale affects speed. And when the size is small, people are closer to each other, so voices are lower; distances are shorter, so the need to hurry is less; people live and engage in proximity, encouraging at least a veneer of civility (and with that, yes, some conformity). But it also provides a passive form of security, for such proximity encourages a shared protection of place, forming community, consistent with the writings of Jane Jacobs. And here, that community is most evident in the numerous cafés everywhere, where time slows while life becomes animated. It’s why my 8,000-person village feels quite urban. 

This slower pace is then reflected in everyday design elements. Paver stones provide scale and texture. Adorned trench drains and bollards delineate walk paths from drive paths while unifying them; compare this to America’s typical curb-and-storm-drain design. Window coverings and balcony railings are opportunities for visual delight and artisanal craft. Instead of the window grates seen on U.S. houses, expressing their security purpose as jail bars or signaling a dicey neighborhood in their aggregation, here one finds animated shutters and/or wrought-iron décor everywhere, attracting one’s eye before falling back into the folds of the vernacular. Their function is not their message. Retail signs are scaled down, with less use of flag signage. Under the shade of awnings, one has time to look at a storefront display; they are designed more to entice than announce (seduction takes time). This all empirically makes sense, as the slower pace calls for less visual noise but more visual detail because one is moving, living at a pace where such things matter. This is Learning From Las Vegas in reverse. And as a result, buildings and outdoor space reclaim their place as the medium that governs our shared public experience, not signs and their multimedia offspring. 

This spirit continues into France’s cities, now accompanied with the indicators of the contemporary metropolis: animated billboards, brand-shouting facades, wider streets, a far faster pace. But architecture still governs the identity and ordering of these cities, and there are still many neighborhoods within them where the size of the streets and buildings are similar to that of the country’s villages, where one’s pace can slow down. These neighborhoods just have more space to accommodate more people. But overall, when compared with their international counterparts, they have less. New York, for example, has a population of 8.25 million in a land area of just over 300 square miles, a ratio of 27,500 people per square mile. Paris, in comparison, holds just over 2 million people in a land area of 41 square miles, a ratio of almost 49,000 people per square mile, and this in a city with few skyscrapers. The result is that one typically lives with less domestic space in Paris. A micro-unit (typically smaller than a studio) of 300–400 square feet in New York is a one-bedroom in Paris. 

Kitchens are smaller because Paris has the highest café/restaurant-to-population ratio of any city. The community characteristics found in villages are scaled up for the cities. Size of space affects behavior. And behavior of course produces culture.

But after looking at many, and staying in some, few suffer from their size, though some habits require change. Smaller closets and spaces encourage one to have less and, if one is able, to favor quality, because quantity is not an option. This encourages better environmental practices. But perhaps even more important, many of these smaller apartments don’t feel as small as their square meters because they avoid the monofunctional trap. In France, 1+1 often equals 3 in accordance with the advice doled out by Charles Moore in The Place of Houses. Rooms in these smaller apartments are designed to accommodate multiple functions; about the only monofunctional space is the toilet room, still traditionally separated from the wash basin and shower. Kitchens are smaller because Paris has the highest café/restaurant-to-population ratio of any city. The community characteristics found in villages are scaled up for the cities. Size of space affects behavior. Behavior produces culture.

Seen through this lens, some key aspects of U.S. culture, and their difference from France’s, can be explained. Prosaically, almost everything in the U.S. is bigger because it can be. But this has profound implications, since the country’s immense size influences the American psyche by encouraging a sense of limitless possibilities, spatially promoting its promise of manifest destiny. The more constrained size of France insinuates limits, and with that perhaps a more fatalistic sense of reality: C’est la vie. And with that size and sense of more possibilities, Americans can perhaps be more innovative, but also certainly more wasteful—of land, of resources—because quantity begets insignificance and innovation produces waste, the detritus of the failures necessary for innovation. But the French, with their size constraints, cannot afford to waste as much and need to design more thoughtfully to address their constraints. 

Space in America is also approached in a more functional manner because there is more of everything to make work. This explains why space in America is organized more monofunctionally; singularity breeds a sense of order, of control. But, also, space in the U.S. can be monofunctional because there is more space for it to be so. Thus, there can be more space between individuals, less of a need to be cognizant of one’s neighbors, further seeding the belief that I am bigger than us. This explains the atrophy of the public realm in America, and the emphasis on the private domain, whether it be one’s personal space or one’s business. But the us is something to be designed for in France because it is part of its cultural and dimensional reality. 

This, then, explains the destination mentality of living in the U.S., a residue of its dominant suburban lifestyle where the distances between places are far enough apart to make them destinations—or places to avoid. The density that comes with less space in France conjoins such places, making them functionally more fluid, less singular. Thus “going out” in America can feel, and often is, more scripted, less serendipitous. The car facilitates this because it provides the individual means to be targeted, while traversing larger spaces more quickly. This speed explains the many blank facades of the postwar American city, of my former hometown of Los Angeles, but also the disproportioned ornaments of a type of Postmodern architecture that took hold and flourished in America, symptomatic of the scale of imagery necessary to communicate at high speeds. The level of detail I see on the streets of France is generally reserved for the interiors of America, where space is still reserved for slowness.

But as America’s influence has infiltrated other cultures (certainly France’s), so has its emphasis on size. Many new French houses and renovated apartments now have larger closets. But bigger without design does not fit well in less space. The now-ubiquitous SUV on the many twisting back roads or the compressed parking spaces here is out of scale but manages to “fit” by bullying its way in. Godzilla returns in this form of globalism. There is no design here, just bigness, just more. This is what happens when the desire of more with more meets the reality of more with less. Size does matter. And when there’s less of it, design matters more. 

Featured image courtesy of the author.