Small is beautiful," as the saying goes. But with every year, the world gets bigger. Taller towers, wider highways, giant TV screens. As that happens, the things that remain small become more and more precious.

Boston's Old State House, for instance. It was a perfectly normal-sized building when it was erected, in 1713. But today, surrounded by skyscrapers, it is completely transformed. It possesses a new charm, a charm its architect could never have envisioned: the charm of a tiny jewel or an exquisite ivory carving. Or a child. Among the tall, blank, dark buildings that surround it, the Old State House, with its slightly loony ornaments -- a lion and a unicorn -- resembles a child in Halloween costume being escorted around the neighborhood by the FBI.

What is true of the Old State House as a building is equally true of Boston as a city. Once Boston, too, was a city of average scale. That's not the case anymore, not when you compare Boston with the typical American megalopolis, with its vast, bleak stretches of freeway and strip malls. By contrast, we've become Tiny Town.

Quite literally so. Boston comprises just 46 square miles of total area. Phoenix is 324, Los Angeles, 465, Honolulu, 596. The new Denver airport is bigger than all of Boston. You could put Louisburg Square in the center strip of many American downtown arteries and forget where you'd left it; it would resemble a minor traffic island. Or take our so-called skyscrapers. No fewer than 12 other US cities boast towers higher than the Hancock, our tallest. Chicago and New York between them have 22. There are several reasons why our buildings are smaller, the most important of which is that most of Boston's subsoil is muck, not bedrock like Manhattan's. By the time technology had solved the foundation problem, Bostonians were used to their smaller scale. The Boston Society of Architects officially came out against the Hancock Tower when it was first proposed, in the late '60s, on the grounds that it was too big and would overwhelm Copley Square and Trinity Church. It's hard to imagine architects in any other American city ganging up like that on one of their own. Further resistance to overbuilding was encouraged by some of the monstrosities of the 1980s, such as the ludicrous 500 Boylston Street complex, by famed architect Philip Johnson.

This quality of smallness may be one reason why Boston is such a big tourist attraction. It's not only the history, it's the human scale.

A photograph of Boston's skyline taken from across the harbor is revealing in this connection. It shows a rather villagelike cluster of office towers. The cluster doesn't look all that different from the spiky range of ships' masts and church steeples you would have seen in a similar picture a century ago. We're bigger now, but we're still a tightly bunched city, an intricate weaving of different kinds of people and activities.

The narrow cobbled streets of Beacon Hill -- how we love their tininess, how closely tailored to our own bodies they feel as we move comfortably around them. Bay Village is like that, too. So is the tangle of 18th-century alleyways next to Quincy Market, the enclave known as the Blackstone Block. So are parts of Charlestown, the South End, the North End, East Boston, South Boston, and many other Boston neighborhoods.

These tightly packed neighborhoods remind us of one of the great facts of Boston's history. Once the city stood on a small pollywog-shaped peninsula, attached to the mainland by the thinnest of tails. As the city of Boston grew, it had to pack as much as it could onto the available land. Anything else meant filling in more of the harbor to create new land, and that was expensive. Sprawl was impossible.

"God is in the details," an architect once remarked, and here, too, smallness is often a virtue. The wrought-iron railing of a balcony, casting a complicated shadow on a textured brick wall, helps us to feel we live in a world that has been crafted by caring hands, a world in which we, too, can expect to be nurtured. You can't have smallness, of course, without bigness: Scale is relative. And our perception of scale has a lot to do with our life cycle as human beings. We were all small once, and we all got bigger. In that sense, we are all Alice in Wonderland: In our imaginations and our dreams, we're always growing and shrinking. When we were little, a table was huge; we couldn't see over the top of it. The memory of being so overwhelmed is one reason we enjoy miniatures, like doll houses and architectural models. For many years, in the lobby of Gund Hall, the architecture school at Harvard University, there was a Plexiglas case, and inside the case was a basswood model of Gund Hall. The model lived inside the building in much the way a baby lives inside its mother. I'll never forget the squeal of utter joy and fascination when my then 6-year-old first saw this model and realized what it was. We all delight in such transformations of scale.

Why else do we flock to the famous "Main Streets" at Disneyland and Walt Disney World? All the buildings along these streets are built at three- quarters the size they would be in real life. The Disney people always get us right: In a world grown too big, we gravitate to a street that is just a little bit too small. It makes us feel more important, and it makes the world feel more manageable.

Architects speak of "human scale." Human scale is the ability of big buildings to relate to the size of human beings. They don't do it with 40- story, sheer, glass walls. They do it with architectural details that are related to the size of people, things meant to be appreciated by people walking by. They can be as simple as people-sized windows. Or they can be more elaborate, like the sculptures and ornaments that remind us of stories. The stork atop the Harvard Lampoon building, in Cambridge, for instance, evokes a smile with its long history of being regularly stolen by the editors of the rival Harvard Crimson. The Liberty Tree plaque, on Washington Street, reminds us of the events of the American Revolution. Through such small wonders, the city becomes voluble. It begins to tell us stories about itself.

Three buildings in Harvard Yard are particularly good examples of the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of being completely the wrong size and, therefore, completely fascinating. The first is Holden Chapel. It's just one room, by far the smallest of the older buildings in the yard, and over the years it has seen many changes. Yet, because of its enormous four-square simplicity and dignity, it is more genuinely monumental than anything else at Harvard. The second is the vast Widener Library, roughly the size and pomposity of a state capitol, which looms among the villagelike brick buildings around it like an elephant at a teddy bears' picnic. The brick buildings make Widener seem gargantuan; Widener makes them seem toylike. Both gain interest as a result. The third is a fussy little gatehouse, even tinier than Holden, that so lacks Holden's qualities of simplicity and self-assurance that it always seems to be puffing itself up to an importance it doesn't deserve. Harvard recurs in the larger city. In the Boston of today, there's a jostling of buildings of different eras, different heights, different styles. It's as if the college basketball team and the eighth-grade drum-and-bugle corps were all crowding into the same elevator. It's a rude jostling sometimes, but it's lively, and the city gains a syncopated rhythm. The marvelous Procter Building, on Bedford Street, becomes all the more breathtakingly elaborate as we see it against the blank architectural giants that are its companions. The astonishing architectural concoction of the Procter's facade -- copper crown, terra-cotta faces, scallop shells -- becomes almost cornucopian by contrast. Small wonders can be spaces, too. They can be those little holes in the wall we grow to love, like the Tasty Sandwich Shop, in Harvard Square. We cozy into such places the way a child snuggles under a desk, turning it into a personal cave. Or they can be outdoors: a Cafe Pamplona, its patio just a scraping together of a few chairs, as informal and evanescent as a chance meeting of friends. Or they can be individual houses that seem so tiny you'd have to be a child to live in them: 44 Hull Street and 9 Jefferson, both in Boston.

Most small wonders are accidents. But some are deliberate. The Kirstein Business Branch of the Boston Public Library, on School Street at Pi Alley, for instance. Its facade is a deliberate imitation -- a sort of living memory -- of the central portion of a more important building that had long been demolished when the Kirstein was erected, in 1930. This was the legendary Tontine Crescent, built in 1794 by the great early Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. Boston keeps the Kirstein as a Victorian might have carried the painted miniature of a lost relative.

Probably the most appealing small wonder in all of New England is the extraordinary Methodist Campground, in Oak Bluffs, on Martha's Vineyard. These cozily decorated houses were small from necessity, because they evolved out of an earlier campground of crowded tents. But elsewhere on the Vineyard, the Ogilvie writer's shack is quite the opposite: an intentionally tiny, one-room studio on a big windswept landscape, feeling like a buoy rocking on the Atlantic. By building small, the architect chose to emphasize the loneliness of the writer's creative act.

Intentional or not, these are all examples of things that seem somehow out of scale, that just don't seem to be quite the right size and therefore attract our attention and interest. When the "wrong" size is too big, it may command awe. When it is too small, it will often inspire love.

Boston, more than any other major American city, is a place that is filled with opportunities for that kind of affection.