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.
Straight streets from station to monument
Cut new straight streets through the old city to join its railway stations to one another and to its centre, and end each one on a monument (a station, a church, an opera house) so that it has an object as well as a use.
Haussmann’s justifications were practical (traffic, light and air, the demolition of insanitary quarters, and, his critics said, the easy movement of troops), but the form of his streets was classical. The Boulevard de Strasbourg runs straight to the Gare de l’Est, whose glazed lunette closes it; the Boulevard Malesherbes ends on the dome of Saint-Augustin; the avenue de l’Opéra was cut to give Garnier’s opera house its approach.
The percée became the tool of every City Beautiful plan, from Burnham’s Chicago to New Delhi.
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, “Straight streets from station to monument”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/haussmann-percees. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.