Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
Rules · Cities · Use · Materials
A glass arcade round the park
Enclose the central park with a wide glass arcade, the “Crystal Palace”, to hold the shops and serve as a winter garden, so that everyone can shop and walk under cover within a few hundred yards of home.
Howard borrowed the name from Paxton’s building of 1851, and the idea from the glazed arcades and exhibition halls of his century. Its ring shape puts the shops as near as possible to every house, and its roof keeps the park usable in bad weather. It was never built in Letchworth or Welwyn, where shops lined ordinary streets, but it is the most striking image of the diagram.
Related rules
Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
Do without the parlour kept for show, and reduce the entrance hall to a small vestibule or a nook of the living room: let the front door open, through it, into a living room built round a large fireplace, open widely into the dining room, with seats, bookcases and cupboards built into its walls.
Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.
Plan the house around a great fireplace at its heart, and let the wings of the plan extend from it in a cross or a pinwheel.
Let each material reveal its own character (the grain of wood, the stratification of stone, the plasticity of concrete) and design each part in the way its material wants to be used.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A glass arcade round the park”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/howard-crystal-palace. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.