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 · Columns · Theory · Walls
The column must stand free
Let columns stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature directly; do not engage them in walls, replace them with pilasters, or set them on pedestals.
A tree trunk is round and stands alone; so, Laugier argues, should a column. An engaged column is a column trapped in a wall, a pilaster is a poor imitation of a column, and a pedestal is a second base under the first. The free-standing colonnade carrying a flat entablature became the programme of French Neoclassicism: Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (begun 1757) and Chalgrin’s Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (1774–84) set it inside churches, where Renaissance and Baroque architects had used arcades on piers.
Related rules
Give the flight of steps before a temple an odd number, so that one who starts with the right foot will also set the right foot first on the top.
Judge every building against the first shelter: four trees for columns, branches laid across them for the entablature, and a pitched roof whose end makes the pediment. These three are the essential parts; all else is added.
Avoid the ornaments that have no model in the hut: broken or curved pediments, pediments on the long side of a roof, orders piled storey upon storey on a church front, arches carried on columns, and twisted or cabled shafts.
Seek in every building only fitness (solidity, healthiness, convenience) and economy (symmetry, regularity, simplicity); a building that has these will please, and ornament added for its own sake is waste.
Draw the solid masonry of a plan in black, filling every pier and thickened wall, so that the rooms read as shaped voids carved from a mass.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The column must stand free”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/laugier-free-column. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.