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.
Rules · Plans · Façades · Ornament
Building from the pattern book
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.
Few houses of colonial and early federal America were designed by architects. They were built by housewrights from books: first the English guides of Batty Langley, William Halfpenny and James Gibbs, then from 1797 Asher Benjamin’s, written for American builders and American materials.
Benjamin’s own designs are mostly of brick, but the carpenters of New England built from his books in timber too, keeping the Palladian rules of the English models (the symmetrical front, the paired rooms, the orders at the door) in white-painted boards, with the orders made thinner to suit wood. For the proportions of rooms and windows Benjamin gives no fixed rule, quoting Chambers’s.
Related rules
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Avoid the ornaments that have no model in the hut: broken or curved pediments, pediments on the long side of a roof, orders piled storey upon storey on a church front, arches carried on columns, and twisted or cabled shafts.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Building from the pattern book”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/benjamin-pattern-book. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.