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.
Streets divided for carts and walkers
Make the streets of a city straight and wide enough for their traffic; pave the middle for carts and animals and raise the sides a little for people on foot, and where the climate is hot or wet, line them with porticoes so that citizens go about their business under cover.
Book III begins with roads, because roads and bridges are the first public works. Palladio adapts street width to climate: in hot places narrow streets between tall houses give shade; in cold ones wide streets let in the sun. He praises the arcaded streets of Padua and Bologna, where one can walk the whole town sheltered from sun and rain, and describes the Roman arrangement of a raised footway on each side of a carriageway.
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, “Streets divided for carts and walkers”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-street-division. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.