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 · Theory · Columns · Entablatures · Pediments
The primitive hut
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.
Vitruvius had told the story of the first buildings as a piece of history (Book II.1). Laugier turned it into a criterion. Architecture, like any art, must imitate nature, and the hut shows nature’s rule for building: vertical supports, horizontal beams, a sloping roof. The classical temple is the hut translated into stone, and it is beautiful to the degree that it stays faithful to it.
The argument gave a whole generation a tool for criticism: of any feature one could ask whether it had a place in the hut.
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.
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.
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.
Understand every building as a combination of four elements (the hearth, the roof on its supports, the enclosure and the mound), each descended from a craft: ceramics, carpentry, weaving and masonry.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The primitive hut”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/laugier-primitive-hut. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.