Rules · Structure · Plans · Materials
Build the house as a standard skeleton of flat concrete slabs, a few columns set back from the slab edges, and a stair; everything else (walls, windows, partitions) is infill that can be placed freely.
3 slabs + 6 columns + 1 stair
Le Corbusier drew the Dom-ino in 1914 as a system for rebuilding war-damaged Flanders quickly: slabs of reinforced concrete poured on site without beams, carried on slender columns and footings, linked by an external stair. The name joins domus (house) with the domino, both a tile of a game that can be added in rows and a picture of the plan’s dots.
The drawing matters because every later point of his doctrine follows from it. Once the slab is carried on columns placed back from its edge, the edge cantilevers and the façade need carry nothing; the plan is no longer bound to walls stacked above walls; and the ground and the roof are freed. Switch on the infill in the figure to see partitions and a glass front that ignore the column grid.
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)
Span the whole depth of the building with the structure so that each floor is a single open plate, adaptable to uses that cannot be foreseen.
Pompidou: 48 m clear span between column lines, 13 bays of 12.8 m
In a framed building the columns and beams carry every load; the outer wall can be reduced to a light cladding hung on the frame, floor by floor, and need grow no thicker as the building rises.
load-bearing wall: thickness grows with height · frame: cladding thickness constant
Omit applied ornament from buildings and everyday objects: it wastes work, money and material, dates quickly, and adds nothing that fine material and exact workmanship cannot give.
With a concrete frame, a house should stand on pilotis, have a free plan and a free façade, be lit by horizontal ribbon windows, and carry a garden on its flat roof.
pilotis · free plan · free façade · ribbon window · roof garden
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Dom-ino frame”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/domino-frame. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.