Rules · Façades · Plans · Walls
Let the wall of a façade curve in plan (concave, convex, concave) so that the front answers the street, the light and the space within, and the order bends with it.
Borromini’s last work, on a narrow corner site, is a façade of two storeys that ripples in plan: in the lower storey the side bays curve in and the centre swells out; in the upper all three bays are concave, and a large oval medallion crowns the centre. The entablatures follow the curves, so that the classical order, once the emblem of the straight line, becomes flexible. Guarini in Turin and the architects of Bohemia and southern Germany carried the idea into whole buildings whose walls seem to move.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Build up a façade in layers: let the wall advance in stages towards the central bay, double the pilasters or columns as it advances, and break the entablature forward over every support.
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.
To combine the unity of a central plan with the direction a church needs, plan the space as an oval, set across the axis to widen the view of the altar, or along it to lead the eye towards it.
Make the stair of a palace a processional space: one broad flight rising to a landing, then turning back in two flights either side to arrive at the principal floor beneath a single great vault.
Make the parterre oblong rather than square, since figures somewhat oblong look better on the ground than square ones; later practice made it as broad as the front of the house and about twice as long.
parterre oblong; later practice: width ≈ house front, length ≈ 2 × width
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The undulating front”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/undulating-facade. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.