A town in each style

The rules it illustrates

A low horizon, one centre of vision, the sun above it. Set the horizon a little below the middle of the picture, about two-fifths of the way up; let the lines of the buildings and the quays run to one point on it near the middle; and put the sun, or its glare, low in the sky over that point, so that the light comes toward the viewer and every building stands against it.

Frame the view like the wings of a stage. Close the picture at one side, or at both, with a dark mass near at hand (a building, a ruin, a clump of trees or a ship), as the painted wings of a stage close its scene; set a feature in the middle distance; and open the centre on a bright distance across water.

Study the light out of doors, at every hour. Study the sky in the open air from before dawn until night, to learn the colours of sunrise, sunset and twilight; mix the colours there, in front of the scene, and carry them back to the picture in the studio.

The henge: the ditch inside the bank. Enclose the gathering place with a circular bank of chalk and dig the ditch on the inside of it, so that the earthwork marks off a sacred interior rather than defending it; leave causeways of undug ground for the entrances.

Timber for the living, stone for the ancestors. Build the circle of the living in timber, which decays, beside the settlement; build the circle of the ancestors in stone, which endures, apart from it; and join the two by avenues and the river.

Link each monument to the river by an avenue. Run a straight, banked or surfaced avenue from the entrance of each monument down to the river, on the monument’s solstice axis, so that the approach itself is aligned on the sun.

The first houses: stakes, wattle and mud. Set up forked stakes, weave twigs between them and daub the walls with mud; roof them with reeds and leaves, steep enough to shed the rain.

The pyramid town: laid out at once, divided by rank. Build the town for a royal pyramid in one campaign, as a walled rectangle on a grid of straight streets; wall off the quarter of the labourers’ small houses from the quarter of the officials’ mansions, and give each rank a standard house.

Where it appears in the book

In the chapters Claude’s Seaports.