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.
Every room to its aspect
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.
Kerr treated aspect (the direction a room faces, for sun and weather) and prospect (what it looks out on) as qualities of the plan in their own right, room by room. A morning room should have the morning sun; the dining room, used at dinner in the evening, should face north, out of the glare and heat of the setting sun; the kitchen and larder should face away from the sun.
In the designs here, which have no site, the rule is followed in the order of the rooms: the family’s rooms to the front, which is taken to be the sunny side, the offices behind. Read on a real site, Kerr would turn the dining room to the north.
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.
Glaze a roof in a series of small ridges and valleys, the panes set at an angle on light sash bars, so that the low sun of morning and evening strikes the glass more squarely, the roof is stiffened by its folds, and the rain runs into gutters in the furrows.
Build on a single grid of 24 feet, set by the 8-foot spacing of the roof ridges and the size of the largest pane of glass, so that every column, girder, sash bar and pane is one of a few standard parts that can be made by machine, delivered and bolted together in any number.
pane 49 × 10 in · ridge 8 ft · bay 24 ft · spans 24, 48, 72 ft · 1,848 × 408 ft
Plan the house in two departments, the family’s and the servants’, with their own rooms and passages (and, as the house grows larger, their own stairs), so that neither sees nor hears the other in the ordinary course of the day: the kitchen and its offices to one side or behind, reached by their own corridor, and nothing of the work of the house carried through the family’s rooms.
Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Every room to its aspect”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kerr-aspect. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.