Make the stair of a palace a processional space: one broad flight rising to a landing, then turning back in two flights either side to arrive at the principal floor beneath a single great vault.
Choose the parti
Begin a design by choosing its parti (the one governing idea of the plan) and commit to it in a first sketch; everything afterwards develops that choice.
Students of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris were given a programme and had twelve hours, shut in a cubicle en loge, to make an esquisse, a small sketch of their solution. They then had weeks to develop it into finished drawings, but they were not allowed to depart from the parti of the sketch. The parti was an attitude to the whole: a domed central hall with courts either side, a long gallery, a U round a forecourt. The jury judged first of all whether it was the right one for the programme.
Related rules
Compose any building on squared paper: first draw its principal axes, then a grid of equal squares; place the walls on the axes and the columns at their intersections; only then open the walls and combine the parts.
grid module = the interaxis of the columns; walls on grid lines; supports on grid points
Build every type (temple, museum, college, hospital, barracks) from the same small set of elements, combined about axes parallel, perpendicular or concentric to one another.
Arrange the principal spaces as a sequence along the main axis (steps, portico, vestibule, great hall, and beyond) so that the visitor’s progress through the building is itself the composition.
Draw the solid masonry of a plan in black, filling every pier and thickened wall, so that the rooms read as shaped voids carved from a mass.
Understand every building as a combination of four elements (the hearth, the roof on its supports, the enclosure and the mound), each descended from a craft: ceramics, carpentry, weaving and masonry.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Choose the parti”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/beaux-arts-parti. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.