Make the stair of a palace a processional space: one broad flight rising to a landing, then turning back in two flights either side to arrive at the principal floor beneath a single great vault.
Few elements, many combinations
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.
Where the Renaissance treatises offered model buildings, Durand offered a combinatorial kit. His famous plate of a museum combines a square, a Greek cross of galleries, four courts and a central rotunda; another page shows how the same porticoes and halls produce a dozen different plans. The idea that a building is an arrangement of standard parts, rather than a unique object, runs from here to the typologies of the Beaux-Arts and the kits of parts of modern architecture.
Related rules
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.
Seek in every building only fitness (solidity, healthiness, convenience) and economy (symmetry, regularity, simplicity); a building that has these will please, and ornament added for its own sake is waste.
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
Begin a design by choosing its parti (the one governing idea of the plan) and commit to it in a first sketch; everything afterwards develops that choice.
Arrange the principal spaces as a sequence along the main axis (steps, portico, vestibule, great hall, and beyond) so that the visitor’s progress through the building is itself the composition.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Few elements, many combinations”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/durand-combination. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.