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.
Piazzas and the buildings round them
Leave piazzas in several parts of the city for markets and assembly, the principal one in the middle; ring it with porticoes, and set round it the palace of the prince or the signoria, the treasury, the prisons and the basilica where justice is done, with the principal church close by.
breadth : length = 2 : 3 (the Latin forum)
Palladio treats the piazza as the place where the public buildings gather, so that the citizens find the offices of government, justice and money together, under porticoes. He then reconstructs the Greek agora and the Latin forum after Vitruvius, the latter two parts broad to three long. His own great public work, the Basilica of Vicenza, is a double loggia of serliane wrapped round the old hall of justice on the Piazza dei Signori (Keep the arch, vary the sides).
Related rules
Proportion rooms and façades by the same ratios that make musical consonances: 1:2 (octave), 2:3 (fifth), 3:4 (fourth), and their compounds.
short plans 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 · medium 1:2, 4:9, 9:16 · long 1:3, 3:8, 1:4
Make rooms round, square, or with a length equal to the diagonal of the square, to a square and a third, a square and a half, a square and two-thirds, or two squares.
circle · 1:1 · 1:√2 · 3:4 · 2:3 · 3:5 · 1:2
Place rooms on the right of the entrance equal and corresponding to those on the left, so that the house is alike on both sides and the walls bear the roof equally.
Make a simple square room as high as it is wide, so that it encloses a cube; for oblong rooms the double cube (twice as long as it is wide and high) is satisfactory in almost any circumstances.
Keep a corridor’s height to no more than one and a half times its width, and divide its length into bays about as long as it is wide, marked by pilasters and by the divisions of the ceiling or vault.
H ≤ 1½ W; bay ≈ W
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Piazzas and the buildings round them”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-piazza. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.