Give the villa garden porticoes for sun and for shade, grottoes made in imitation of nature with tufa and shells, evergreens planted in straight rows at equal distances, and hedges of box; set vines on columns over the walks.
Squares on the radial streets
Partway along the sixteen streets that run from the centre to the gates and towers, open a secondary square in each, and give half of them parish churches and the other half markets, so that every quarter has its church and its market close at hand.
Filarete’s city is a wheel: the radial streets carry traffic from the centre to the gates, and a ring of squares partway out gives each spoke its own neighbourhood centre. His text is not entirely consistent about which squares hold churches and which markets, and later reconstructions differ in detail; here the churches stand on the streets to the gates and the market loggias on the streets to the towers.
Related rules
Lay the ideal garden out on a circular plan in concentric rings, woods outside, then meadows and orchards, then gardens of knots and clipped evergreens divided by walks, with water and the fountain of the goddess at the centre.
Proportion rooms and façades by the same ratios that make musical consonances: 1:2 (octave), 2:3 (fifth), 3:4 (fourth), and their compounds.
short plans 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 · medium 1:2, 4:9, 9:16 · long 1:3, 3:8, 1:4
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.
Compose from the plan: base it on the elemental figures (circle, square, rectangle and their derivatives), arrange its parts symmetrically about axes, and develop section and elevation from it together.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Squares on the radial streets”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/filarete-ring-squares. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.