Edge the beds before the portico with box, clip box into figures of animals set facing one another, and in the garden beyond cut it into many shapes, even into the letters of the owner’s name.
The “D” plan for places of assembly
For a hall of assembly use the “D” or tribune plan, a half-circle closed by a straight side: it gives ample room to the audience, a central place to the speaker and scope for display in the architecture.
Stratton derives the form from the Greek theatre by way of the Roman exedrae, open half-domed recesses in which, he says, poets and philosophers declaimed. It returned at the end of the eighteenth century in the Chambre des Pairs and the Chambre des Députés in Paris, and was followed in the Sorbonne and in parliament houses across the Continent.
He wants the student to learn it as an independent type first, and notes that its approaches need careful adjustment because it becomes the focal point of any building it is part of.
Related rules
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.
Seek in every building only fitness (solidity, healthiness, convenience) and economy (symmetry, regularity, simplicity); a building that has these will please, and ornament added for its own sake is waste.
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.
Draw the solid masonry of a plan in black, filling every pier and thickened wall, so that the rooms read as shaped voids carved from a mass.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The “D” plan for places of assembly”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/stratton-d-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.