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 · Plans
The square room as a cube
Make a simple square room as high as it is wide, so that it encloses a cube; for oblong rooms the double cube (twice as long as it is wide and high) is satisfactory in almost any circumstances.
Stratton calls the square the most difficult plan to treat directly: any departure from its simplicity demands smaller units in sympathy with the containing square. The cubic room is the simple solution, and he repeats it for square halls with galleries, whose proportion of width to height approximates the cube.
His square rooms may be covered with a flat ceiling, a cove, cross vaults or a dome. When a cove is used he makes it a quarter to a fifth of the whole height, which leaves a square panel in the centre of the ceiling.
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, “The square room as a cube”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/stratton-cube. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.