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.
Close each long view with a public building
End each long street on a monument: put a church on the axis of the main street at the far side of each square, so that the view along it finishes on a portico and a dome or steeple.
Craig placed churches on the axis of George Street beyond both squares. At the west end the plan was carried out: St George’s Church (1811–14), with its dome, closes the view the length of the street. At the east end Sir Lawrence Dundas acquired the church site before the town could build on it and put up his own house there (1771–74), set back behind a forecourt; the church, St Andrew’s, was moved to a plot on George Street, where its tall steeple marks the middle of the long street instead.
The rule that every vista must end in an object runs through classical planning from Sixtus V’s Rome to Haussmann’s Paris and the Washington of the McMillan Plan.
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, “Close each long view with a public building”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/craig-vista-churches. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.