Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rings and wards
Plan the town as rings round a central garden and cut it into six wards by six boulevards; put the great public buildings round the garden, a park beyond them, houses in the middle rings, and factories and warehouses on the outer ring beside a circular railway.
Each ward is a sixth of the town and, Howard suggests, almost a town in itself, with its own schools, churches and shops. The concentric order sorts the uses: civic life at the centre, homes in between, industry at the edge where the railway can serve it without passing through the streets. Howard insisted that his diagrams were diagrams only and that a real plan must follow the site; Letchworth, the first garden city, has no rings at all.
Related rules
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.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Rings and wards”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/howard-ward-and-centre. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.