To combine the unity of a central plan with the direction a church needs, plan the space as an oval, set across the axis to widen the view of the altar, or along it to lead the eye towards it.
Rules · Cities · Plans · Theory
The town as a forest
Plan a town as a park is cut through a forest: with many straight streets, squares from which several streets branch, and broad entrances, so that there is regularity in the details and variety, even a certain disorder, in the whole.
Laugier’s chapter on the embellishment of towns asks the planner to treat a city as a forest to be cut into rides and clearings, in the manner of a royal hunting park. Straight streets should cross at squares with several branches; entrances should be free and grand; and the whole should combine order with surprise, so that the town never becomes monotonous.
Karlsruhe, cut out of the Hardt forest a generation before Laugier wrote in 1753, is almost a literal case of the image.
Related rules
Let the wall of a façade curve in plan (concave, convex, concave) so that the front answers the street, the light and the space within, and the order bends with it.
Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Make the stair of a palace a processional space: one broad flight rising to a landing, then turning back in two flights either side to arrive at the principal floor beneath a single great vault.
Give the flight of steps before a temple an odd number, so that one who starts with the right foot will also set the right foot first on the top.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The town as a forest”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/rococo-town-as-forest. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.