Lay the posad out in streets radiating from the market square, and give every household a fenced yard with its house, barn, bath-house and garden, so that houses stand apart among gardens rather than in rows.
Herberstein noticed that Moscow looked much larger than it was, because each house had a spacious yard and garden. The unit of the Russian town was the dvor, the fenced household yard, with the log house usually set gable-end to the street and its outbuildings behind; streets were paved, if at all, with logs, and closed at night with barriers.
The spacing helped against fire, which nevertheless swept these towns again and again; the posad as a whole was enclosed by an earth bank and palisade with wooden towers.
Divide a square naos into nine bays: dome the central one on a drum over four columns, barrel-vault the four arms of the cross, and cover the four corner bays lower; add three apses to the east and a narthex to the west.
arms = central bay width; corners lower; dome on pendentives over four columns
Crown the four corner bays of a cross-in-square with smaller domes on drums around the great central dome, making a five-domed quincunx.
Set the kremlin on the high ground where two rivers meet, so that water guards two sides; wall it with towers at the corners and gates, dig a moat along the landward side, and put within it the cathedral, the prince’s palace and the metropolitan’s court.
Keep a broad strip before the kremlin wall free of houses and churches, so that fire in the wooden town cannot reach the fortress and defenders have an open field of fire; let the market be held on it.
Build the principal cathedral after an honoured prototype: study the old cathedral that is to be the model and keep its form (five domes, walls divided into bays each crowned with a rounded gable, three apses to the east) while building it with the best new craft.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Every house in its own yard”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/posad-yards. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.