To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
Rules · Proportion · Entablatures · Pedestals · Walls
The room as an order without its columns
Treat the walls of a room as an order whose columns are left out: the dado, with its base and its rail, stands for the pedestal, the plain wall for the column, and the cornice for the entablature; proportion them as that order is proportioned, so that the cornice of a lofty room is deeper than that of a low one.
height = pedestal (dado) + column (wall) + entablature (cornice); by Vignola’s rule, dado ≈ 4/19 and entablature ≈ 3/19 of the height
The rooms of the English Palladians are designed as their fronts are. Where a room has columns or pilasters, the entablature they carry runs round it under the ceiling; where it has none, the same parts are kept without them: a dado with its base and surbase moulding at the height a pedestal would have, and a cornice, or a whole entablature, at the top.
Vignola’s general rule gives the parts for any height: of nineteen parts, four to the pedestal, twelve to the column and three to the entablature. The designer applies it, with the canon of the order the room is given, to the room’s height from floor to ceiling. The depth of the skirting and the rail within the dado, and the dado’s limits of about 0.6 to 1.15 m, are editorial.
Related rules
Proportion every step so that twice its height plus its depth equals the length of a natural pace on the level: two feet, or 24 pouces.
2 r + g = 24 pouces ≈ 65 cm (modern practice: 60–66 cm)
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 architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Rusticate the lowest storey or the basement, its stones marked by deep joints, as the plainest and strongest part of the building; keep the dressed stone, the orders and the ornament for the storeys above.
Bind the corners of a wall with dressed stones laid alternately long and short on each face, so that they bond into both walls and mark the angle of the building.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The room as an order without its columns”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/room-as-order. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.