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 · Plans · Vaults · Proportion
Break a corridor into bays
Keep a corridor’s height to no more than one and a half times its width, and divide its length into bays about as long as it is wide, marked by pilasters and by the divisions of the ceiling or vault.
H ≤ 1½ W; bay ≈ W
A corridor, Stratton says, is for moving through, not for lingering like a long gallery, so it should not be too tall or too low, and its bays should check the impression of undue length and carry the scale of the building through it. Flat ceilings, barrel and segmental vaults, intersecting vaults on pilasters or corbels, and saucer domes on pendentives are all suitable.
Long corridors should be widened at the centre by a top-lit vestibule or a staircase hall, and lit from the ends, sides or top; he points to the English town houses of the Adam brothers and of Soane.
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.
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.
Compose any building on squared paper: first draw its principal axes, then a grid of equal squares; place the walls on the axes and the columns at their intersections; only then open the walls and combine the parts.
grid module = the interaxis of the columns; walls on grid lines; supports on grid points
Build every type (temple, museum, college, hospital, barracks) from the same small set of elements, combined about axes parallel, perpendicular or concentric to one another.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Break a corridor into bays”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/stratton-corridor-bays. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.