It’s a time-honored trick that harkens back to the Middle Ages when craftsmen placed narrow, stained-glass windows well above eye level on the stone walls of churches. Worshippers were compelled to lift their eyes and follow the dagger-thin vertical lines of the saintly windows heavenward, expanding not only their souls but their perceptions of the space around them. “By concentrating vertical items in one area, you can shift attendees’ attention away from its small scale, and leave them instead with a feeling of something bigger and grander,” says Ross Weitzberg, president of exhibit-design firm Space Potential.