Plan the principal hall as a long rectangle entered on its short side through a porch with two columns between the side walls and a vestibule, and put a great round hearth in the centre of the hall, ringed by four columns carrying a raised roof.
Rules · Cities · Plans · Geometry
The Hippodamian grid
Divide the city into equal rectangular blocks by straight streets crossing at right angles, and assign whole blocks to the public buildings; but let walls follow the ground, not the grid.
Aristotle credits Hippodamus of Miletus, in the fifth century BC, with inventing the division of cities, and says he laid out the Piraeus. Grids are older than Hippodamus (Miletus itself was replanned on one after 479 BC), but his name became attached to the method. Aristotle approves of it for convenience and beauty, while warning that regular streets make a city easier for an enemy to take.
Priene, refounded on a steep slope above the Maeander around 350 BC, is the clearest example. Its blocks measure about 47 by 35 m (160 by 120 Ionic feet), each first divided into eight house lots; the east–west streets run level along the contours while the north–south streets climb as stairs; the agora, temples, theatre and gymnasia each take whole blocks; and the wall winds round the hill quite independently of the grid.
Related rules
Do not lay the stylobate dead level: raise it gently toward the middle of each side, for a perfectly flat platform looks to the eye as if it sagged.
Parthenon: rise ≈ 11 cm over 69.5 m (flanks), ≈ 6.5 cm over 30.9 m (fronts), about 1 : 600
Give the shaft a continuous convex curve from base to necking, departing from a straight taper by only a few hundredths of a diameter, so that the column seems to flex under its load rather than to pinch.
Parthenon: greatest departure ≈ 1.7 cm on a shaft 9.6 m high (≈ 1⁄110 D)
A Doric frieze cannot obey all three of its rules at a corner: triglyphs over the column axes, a triglyph turning the corner, and metopes as broad as they are high. One of them must give way.
displacement of the corner triglyph = e − t⁄2 (e = half-depth of the architrave, t = triglyph width)
Let one simple ratio govern the whole: at the Parthenon the lower diameter is to the axial spacing, the width of the stylobate to its length, and the height of the order to the width of the front, all very nearly as 4 is to 9.
D : axial spacing ≈ 1.905 : 4.296 ≈ 4 : 9; stylobate 30.88 : 69.50 ≈ 4 : 9
Plan a Greek theatre by inscribing three squares in the orchestra circle; the side nearest the scene fixes the front of the stage (proscaenium), and the scene is set back to a line tangent to the circle.
proscaenium at r cos 45° ≈ 0.71 r from the centre; logeion 10–12 ft high
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Hippodamian grid”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/hippodamian-grid. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.