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EM•PHA•SIZE

(verb)
to highlight a building using its size in order to force its presence into the public's perception
  • Synonyms:
  • grow
  • pump up
  • highlight
  • point out
  • enlarge
  • dramatize
  • showcase
  • promote
  • expose
  • Antonyms:
  • conceal
  • withhold
  • cover
  • hide
  • neglect
  • ignore
  • forget

„Anabolic steroids stimulate muscle tissue to grow and bulk up in response to training, by mimicking the effect of naturally produced testosterone on the body. Anabolic steroids can remain in the body anywhere from a couple of days to about a year. Steroids have become popular because they may improve endurance, strength, and muscle mass. However, research has not.

http://kidshealth.org/teen/food_fitness/sports/steroids.html#

borrow + emphasize

To emphasize architecture means to play with its scale – to get a building to stand out because of its size. Giving importance to a building by means of emphasizing presents the building as a leading narrator of the city’s story. Emphasizing architecture produces impressiveness, intensity, power, sometimes even fear. ‘Pumped up’ buildings are very often mistaken for grand and monumental.
In the case of Skopje, the tactic emphasize produces architecture that is trying very hard to force itself into the characteristic image of the city. When it comes to newly invented architecture, visual force is one of the few ways for it to be noticed enough to be mistaken for having importance that levels heritage.

Emphasizing, as a tactic, always follows another tactic. In this section there are three types of examples: emphasize following refacade, reconstruct or borrow.

In the example of emphasize following refacade, the shopping center City Gallery (originally: Department store NA-MA, 1958) is currently not just being refacaded, but also three more levels are being added, so that the new skin (in an invented style) would have an emphasized surface.

The reconstructed examples are bigger in scale than their originals, forcing back the memories of the Skopje they used to be a part of and with that forcing their resurrected presence upon the citizens’ nostalgia.

The borrowed examples are buildings that incredibly resemble buildings-artifacts from other cities. These buildings also show the most drastic differences in size. One could say that the copies are trying to compensate with size for their lack of meaning and history.

Is the new building of the Financial Police Office, as a three times bigger copy of the 1502 Tempietto from Donato Bramante, also a masterpiece of High Italian Renaissance?

There are architectural examples through history which prove the emphasize tactic; massive staircases leading to courtrooms have created fear and tension and heights have fabricated magnificence.
Bigness is loud.
But if one is ‘forced’ to look at an image long enough, will one start believing that that image is reality?

reconstruct + emphasize

refacade + emphasize