“You’re destroying the scale!”

[Frank Lloyd Wright] often used to tell us, paraphrasing his own essay on house building: “I took the human being, at five feet eight and one-half inches tall, like myself, as the human scale. If I had been taller, the scale might have been different…”

Someone once remarked to him, “Whenever I walk into one of your buildings, the doorways are so low my hat gets knocked off.” Mr. Wright merely suggested, “Take your hat off when you come into a house.” While I was at the Fellowship, the tallest apprentice around was Wes Peters, six feet and four inches. Mr. Wright never let him forget about his height, since both Wes and the Taliesin ceilings were six feet four. Occasionally, when we gathered in one of the rooms at Taliesin, Mr. Wright would roar out at Wes, “Sit down, Wes! You’re destroying the scale!”

—Edgar Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright