Rules · Theory · Plans · Façades · Structure
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
Each point is the reverse of a feature of the masonry house: walls down to a damp ground become columns that lift the house and free the ground; rooms fixed by stacked bearing walls become a free plan; a façade that carries the floors becomes a free skin; tall, narrow windows limited by piers become a continuous band; a pitched roof becomes a usable terrace. Le Corbusier presented them as technical consequences of reinforced concrete, and as the grammar of a new style.
The Villa Savoye at Poissy (1928–31) combines all five, with a ramp rising through the middle of the house from the ground to the roof as a “promenade”. Switch the points off one at a time in the figure and the villa turns back, step by step, into a conventional house.
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
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The five points of a new architecture”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/five-points. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.