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.
Three parallel streets between two squares
On a ridge, run the principal street along the crest and make it the widest; set a square at each end of it; lay two more streets along the flanks, and narrow lanes between them for coach-houses, shops and lesser houses.
Craig’s grid is the simplest possible plan, and its strength is legibility: from anywhere in the New Town you know where you are. George Street, on the spine of the ridge, was the grand street; the two squares close its ends; the flanking streets and the lanes (Rose Street and Thistle Street) give each block a hierarchy of fronts and backs, great houses to the main streets and service to the lanes.
Plots were sold to private builders subject to conditions laid down by the council, which were tightened in the decades after 1767, so that the streets filled with stone houses of a common type (three bays wide, three storeys over a sunk basement), built one at a time but reading as continuous terraces.
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.
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.
Make rooms round, square, or with a length equal to the diagonal of the square, to a square and a third, a square and a half, a square and two-thirds, or two squares.
circle · 1:1 · 1:√2 · 3:4 · 2:3 · 3:5 · 1:2
Place rooms on the right of the entrance equal and corresponding to those on the left, so that the house is alike on both sides and the walls bear the roof equally.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Three parallel streets between two squares”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/craig-new-town-grid. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.