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.
Rules · Site · Theory · Materials
A building should grow from its site
Shape a building to its place so that it seems to grow out of the ground: take its lines from the landscape, its materials from the region, and its plan from the life it will hold.
Wright called his work “organic” in the sense that each part is related to the whole as the parts of a plant are, and the whole to its setting. Fallingwater (1936–39) is the famous demonstration: the house is anchored to the boulders beside a waterfall by a core of local sandstone, and its concrete terraces cantilever over the stream in layers that echo the rock ledges beneath. The residents hear the falls in every room; a hanging stair descends from the living room to the water.
Related rules
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
On an equator-facing window, make the overhang deep enough to shade the whole window from the high noon sun of summer, and no deeper, so that the low winter sun passes beneath it into the room.
noon sun altitude = 90° − latitude ± 23.44° · overhang D = window height ⁄ tan(summer altitude)
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A building should grow from its site”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/organic-architecture. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.