Rules · Façades · Columns · Entablatures
Build up a façade in layers: let the wall advance in stages towards the central bay, double the pilasters or columns as it advances, and break the entablature forward over every support.
Renaissance façades are usually flat planes on which the order is drawn like a diagram. The Baroque façade is modelled in depth. At Santa Susanna Maderno moves from pilasters at the edges to half-columns and three-quarter columns at the centre, so that light and shadow grow stronger towards the door. The entablature, following each advance, breaks into many short pieces (ressauts), each capped by its own projecting cornice, and the eye is carried inward and upward by the rhythm.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
Let the wall of a façade curve in plan (concave, convex, concave) so that the front answers the street, the light and the space within, and the order bends with it.
Where a church has a tall nave and low aisles, give the front a lower storey as wide as the whole church and an upper storey as wide as the nave, and join the two with great scrolls.
Before the mother church lay out an oval piazza enclosed by free-standing colonnades four columns deep, so that the church seems to embrace the faithful; set an obelisk at the centre and a fountain on each side along the cross axis, and join the oval to the church front by straight corridors.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Step the wall forward to the centre”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/baroque-layered-planes. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.