Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rules · Materials · Plans · Theory
Truth to materials
Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.
Ruskin condemned three kinds of architectural deceit: suggesting a structure that is not the real one, painting surfaces to imitate other materials, and using machine-made ornament. Morris and the Arts and Crafts designers turned his moral argument into a way of building. The Red House that Philip Webb built for William Morris at Bexleyheath in 1859 is plain red brick under steep tiled roofs; its windows are of different sizes and heights, each placed for the room behind it; its porch has a pointed arch because an arch is the natural way to span an opening in brick.
The rule leads, by way of Wright’s “nature of materials”, directly to the modernists, who, however, applied it to steel, glass and concrete.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Truth to materials”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/truth-to-materials. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.