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.
Rules · Plans · Modules · Geometry
Axes first, then walls, then columns
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
Durand’s plates show the procedure step by step, and the figure repeats it. Because every element (a column, a wall, a doorway, a room) is sized to the grid, the parts can be recombined freely without losing their proportion, and plan, section and elevation can be drawn from each other. The method is the ancestor of the tartan grids of the nineteenth-century railway station, the modular coordination of twentieth-century industrial building and the structural grids of every office plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Axes first, then walls, then columns”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/durand-grid. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.