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.
Poché: the solid drawn black
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.
A round room inside a square block leaves thick corners of masonry; a vaulted hall needs deep piers. Beaux-Arts draughtsmen filled these with black ink (or pink wash for construction drawings) and judged a plan partly by how well its poché was distributed: not too much, which was wasteful, and not too little, which meant structure had been forgotten. Poché made visible the idea that rooms are figures and masonry the ground, the reverse of the modern open plan.
Related rules
Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.
Let columns stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature directly; do not engage them in walls, replace them with pilasters, or set them on pedestals.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Poché: the solid drawn black”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/beaux-arts-poche. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.