Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rules · Plans · Structure · Walls
Destroy the box
Open the corners, extend the roofs and terraces beyond the walls with cantilevers, and let the space of the house flow outward rather than being enclosed in rooms like boxes.
Wright described his career as a campaign against the box of four walls. By placing supports a little in from the corners, he found, the corner could be glazed or opened and the walls became screens; with reinforced-concrete cantilevers the floors and roofs could reach out into the landscape. The European modernists, who admired his Wasmuth portfolio of 1910–11, reached a similar freedom by way of the concrete frame.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
A saddle surface in which two opposite corners are raised and two lowered is a hyperbolic paraboloid; it contains two families of straight lines, so it can be formed with straight boards and yet has double curvature.
y = k·x·z (or any bilinear patch through four points not in one plane)
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
Hang a chain (or a model of strings loaded like the building) from two points; the curve it takes, turned upside down, is the ideal shape of an arch carrying the same loads, in pure compression.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Destroy the box”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/destroy-the-box. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.