To combine the unity of a central plan with the direction a church needs, plan the space as an oval, set across the axis to widen the view of the altar, or along it to lead the eye towards it.
Rules · Ornament · Vaults · Domes
The ceiling answering to the room
Give the state rooms ceilings divided into compartments by moulded beams, with a great circle or oval in the middle, or coffered, or coved; give lesser rooms a plain ceiling with the cornice round it and, from the middle of the century, a plaster rose for the lamp; and over halls and stairs that rise to the roof, a dome.
Ware held to the compartmented ceilings Inigo Jones had brought from Italy, deep beams framing panels round a central figure, and condemned the French ceilings of loose scrolls and shells that the Rococo plasterers were making in the 1740s and 1750s. Both kinds are built here by the room’s manner: the compartments for the Palladian rooms, the scrolls for the Rococo.
Adam replaced the heavy beams with ornament in low relief on a coloured ground: circles, fans and roundels, the design answered by the carpet below. The Regency and the Greek Revival made the ceilings of the lesser rooms plain, with a rose in the middle, kept coffers for the halls, and raised shallow saucer domes over halls and stairs, as Soane did in his own house and at the Bank of England.
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.
Light the climax of a Baroque interior (the altar or the dome) from windows the visitor cannot see, so that it seems to glow of itself.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
Light the hall over the front door with a fanlight: a half-round light with bars radiating like the ribs of a fan, or, after 1770, an elliptical one, often with narrow lights at the sides of the door.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The ceiling answering to the room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/ceilings-by-rank. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.