Rules · Theory · Ornament · Pediments
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.
Laugier’s list reads like an inventory of Baroque practice. A pediment is the end of a roof, so it cannot be broken, curved or placed on a side wall; a church front of two storeys with scrolls pretends that the building is two buildings. The attack was aimed at the Rococo decoration of his own day as much as at Rome, and it helped end both.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
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.
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.
Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Licences to avoid”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/laugier-licences. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.