Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Positive outdoor space
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.
Outdoor space is negative when it is simply what is left over after the buildings have been placed, and positive when it has a definite shape: when buildings, wings, walls and trees wrap around it so that it feels like a room open to the sky. Alexander observes that people use positive spaces and avoid negative ones. An L-shaped house wrapped around its garden, like Webb’s Red House with its well-house in the angle, is the simplest example.
Related rules
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)
Place heavy materials (concrete, stone, brick, earth) where the winter sun falls on them inside the insulated envelope, so that they absorb heat by day and give it back at night.
Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Positive outdoor space”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/positive-outdoor-space. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.