Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Rules · Cities · Plans · Theory
Design a city like a park
Lay out a town as a gardener lays out a forest park: wide, straight streets as its avenues, squares where they meet, well-marked entrances, and within that order enough variety of buildings that the whole never becomes monotonous.
Laugier turned from the single building to the city at the end of his Essai. Paris, he complained, was a forest grown wild: crooked streets, no proper entrances, fine buildings hidden in alleys. The remedy was the art of the landscape gardener: cut straight avenues, open star-shaped crossings and squares, and mark the approaches to the city with gates or monuments. But he warned equally against a dull chessboard; the park pleases because symmetry and surprise are mixed.
Edinburgh’s New Town is a modest version of the prescription: an orderly grid of straight streets on a ridge, two squares, and public buildings (Register House at the entrance from the North Bridge, the domed church, the Assembly Rooms) set where they break the regular fronts.
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Cite this page Chris Paton, “Design a city like a park”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/laugier-city-as-forest. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.