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.
The star: avenues radiating from a monument
Where many avenues meet, make a round place with a monument at its centre, bring the avenues to it at equal angles, and wall the place with uniform buildings between them.
The Étoile was already a star of five roads round the Arc de Triomphe; Haussmann made it twelve, cutting new avenues to complete the figure and having Jacques-Ignace Hittorff design identical mansions for the wedges between them, set behind a ring of gardens. Each avenue ends on the arch, and the arch stands at the end of every view.
The rond-point goes back to the hunting forests of the French kings and to Laugier’s park-city; after Paris it became a signature of Beaux-Arts planning, from Washington to Canberra.
Related rules
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
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, “The star: avenues radiating from a monument”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/haussmann-etoile. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.