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 · Site · Theory
Town and country married, and the belt kept for ever
Build a town of limited size (about 32,000 people on 1,000 acres) in the middle of an estate of 6,000 acres owned by the community, and keep the surrounding 5,000 acres as a permanent agricultural belt; when the town is full, found another beyond it.
town 1,000 acres + belt 5,000 acres; 30,000 in the town + 2,000 on the land
Howard’s “Three Magnets” diagram weighs the town (work, amusement, high wages, but foul air, slums and high rents) against the country (beauty, fresh air, low rents, but no work and no society) and offers a third, “Town-Country”, which has the virtues of both. The means is financial as much as physical: land bought at agricultural prices by a trust, whose rising value as the town grows pays for its public works.
The belt keeps the town from sprawling and puts farms, allotments and institutions that need space within a walk of every house. When the town reaches its limit, growth jumps the belt to a new town, and a cluster of garden cities joined by railways forms what Howard called the Social City.
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.
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.
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.
On flat land, keep the house low and let its lines run parallel to the ground: low-pitched hipped roofs with deep overhangs, continuous sills and copings, bands of windows, and terraces extending into the garden.
roof pitch ≈ 15°–25° · eaves projecting 1.5–3 m
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Town and country married, and the belt kept for ever”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/howard-town-country. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.