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.
A civic axis from the lake to the civic centre
Widen one street into the city’s main axis, running from a monument on the lakefront to a domed civic centre on high ground inland, and let the rest of the plan hang on it.
Burnham chose Congress Street for the axis and put the civic centre (city, county and federal offices under a single towering dome) at its crossing with Halsted Street, about two miles west of the lake, where diagonal avenues would converge on it as the avenues of Paris converge on the Étoile. The civic centre was never built, but Congress Street was eventually widened as the Plan asked, and the idea of a single commanding axis is the Beaux-Arts ancestry of the Plan made visible.
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.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A civic axis from the lake to the civic centre”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/burnham-congress-axis. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.