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.
A theatre that does not face south
Build the theatre on a healthy site and do not let its curved auditorium face south, where the sun would heat the enclosed air and harm the audience sitting through the plays.
An audience sits still for hours with open pores, says Vitruvius, and absorbs whatever the air brings; so the theatre’s site matters as much as its geometry. The plan itself is drawn from four equilateral triangles in a circle (The Roman theatre: four triangles).
Related rules
Lay out a city’s streets so that they do not line up with the directions of the principal winds, which otherwise rush down them cold, violent and unhealthy.
Lay the channel of an aqueduct with a steady fall of not less than a quarter of an inch in every hundred feet, cover it with a vault against the sun, and carry it through hills in tunnels and across valleys on arches.
minimum fall ≈ 1 : 4,800 (Morgan’s reading); Nîmes aqueduct: ≈ 12.6 m in ≈ 50 km ≈ 1 : 4,000
Divide the city into equal rectangular blocks by straight streets crossing at right angles, and assign whole blocks to the public buildings; but let walls follow the ground, not the grid.
Keep a free agora for public life, clear of merchandise and near the magistrates, the temples and the gymnasium; put buying and selling in a separate market place convenient for goods.
Make the Greek agora square, surround it with spacious colonnades, double if possible, with close-set columns and architraves of stone or marble, and walks above on an upper floor.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A theatre that does not face south”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/vitruvius-theatre-site. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.