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.
The Grand Avenue: a park of schools and churches
Run a ring avenue about 420 feet wide through the middle of the residential rings as a continuous park, and set in it the schools, with their playgrounds, and sites for churches of every denomination.
Howard calculates that the Grand Avenue, three miles round, would make a park of over a hundred acres within a few minutes’ walk of every house. Putting the schools in it gave each child green space and a short walk; putting the churches in it made them the equal neighbours of the schools, their number and creed left to the townspeople.
Related rules
Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
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.
Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.
Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Grand Avenue: a park of schools and churches”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/howard-grand-avenue. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.