Plan the house in two departments, the family’s and the servants’, with their own rooms and passages (and, as the house grows larger, their own stairs), so that neither sees nor hears the other in the ordinary course of the day: the kitchen and its offices to one side or behind, reached by their own corridor, and nothing of the work of the house carried through the family’s rooms.
Almshouses, not workhouses
House the poor as a Christian community: small dwellings, each with its own door and hearth, round a garden court, with a chapel over the gate, not in a walled workhouse built for surveillance and punishment.
The New Poor Law of 1834 put the destitute in workhouses, many built on a radiating plan so that the master could watch every yard. Pugin set one of them, with its separated families, gruel and whip, against a medieval almshouse: a college of dwellings round a quadrangle, with a chapel, a master who is a priest, and a garden. The contrast is loaded, but the almshouse plan was widely revived by Victorian charities.
Related rules
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.
Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.
Let a town’s churches and public buildings, not its engines of utility, shape its skyline: a spire to each parish, halls for its guilds, a cross in its market place.
Orientate a church with its altar to the east; give it a chancel clearly distinct from the nave (lower, narrower and at least a third of its length); a porch, preferably on the south; a steep roof; a tower at the west or beside the nave; open benches instead of pews; and details of the Middle Pointed style.
Arrange a building for its uses first and let its outline follow: gables, bays, chimneys and towers go where the rooms behind need them. Never contrive irregularity for effect, and never force a symmetrical front on an unsymmetrical plan.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Almshouses, not workhouses”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/pugin-almshouse. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.