In grumpy moments, I rant here about developers building buildings in Copenhagen that are too high … buildings that are much too high for the city so they not only dominate and overshadow nearby properties but also and inevitably ignore or even destroy the human scale of the streets around.

But even buildings that keep to the general five or six floors found throughout the historic city centre can be just as intrusive and disruptive if they are too long and have facades with unbroken and unrelenting horizontal lines.

I'm not suggesting that developments that cover a block or a long street frontage should be given faux subdivisions …. a concrete office block hiding behind fake vernacular façades for instance.

Throughout the city, through its history and until the middle of the last century, single and relatively narrow plots dominated even when the building was part of a larger street group of contemporary buildings …. such as the streets of apartment buildings in the second half of the 19th century.

The few exceptions were if a new building was for the monarch or the state or the city when much larger buildings were required but, even then, long horizontal lines of plinths or roof gutters are normally balanced by either vertical elements of the façade, such as quoins or pilasters or by stronger vertical features on the facade designs so key sections that break forward or set back or by bold architectural features like turrets or porches.

Again, that is not to suggest architects return to Gothic towers like some weird fake world from Disney - good buildings should be true to their own period - but architects and engineers fail to see how several hundred metres of uniform glazing might be appropriate for an industrial or commercial building on an open site but is oppressive and unrelenting in a city-centre street.

With the primacy of the individual plots there is, in Copenhagen, an established street pattern that was influenced by the lines of the outer boundary of the defences so streets curve to follow a more important topography so Copenhagen is certainly not a city based on a grid and nor is it dominated by wide straight streets.

It means that the width of the street and how straight or how curved the street frontage is important along with the width of the street itself and the subdivisions of plot boundaries, marking the property of different individual owners, and, along with tight restrictions on height, all together determine the width and the rhythm and the character of the different streets.

In most streets that means that the different facades of different buildings form points of focus; define sight lines; mark progress along the street and give a human and so a comfortable sense of both distance and space. Basically it gives the city streets an appropriate scale.

And in Copenhagen that sense of appropriate scale does not mean small or self-effacing buildings.

There are many amazing streets in the city that could have represented this sense of an underlying rhythm and human scale but this view, looking south along the east side of Nytorv shows, when you look at the people on the pavement, that the buildings are neither small nor twee or quaint. This is strong, coherent, carefully articulated, architecture with large buildings.

Too many developers see their primary ambition has to be to produce a building that is novel for the sake of being novel - as their main selling point - but, in execution, too many turn out to be unremittingly boring and impose overlong facades that might look fine on a drawing board but, in reality, seen at an angle along a street of buildings, they follow a very different rhythm, and the intruder can easily make people on the street feel small and isolated.