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.
Streets turned away from the winds
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.
Vitruvius finds the eight winds with a gnomon and a circle drawn on a levelled marble in the middle of the future city; the streets are then drawn along the lines between the winds. The octagonal Tower of the Winds at Athens, which he describes, marks the same eight directions with carved figures of the winds on its faces.
Related rules
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
Bury no one inside the city; keep bodies, urns and sarcophagi outside the walls, even the relics of apostles and martyrs. So the great shrines of the martyrs rise in the cemeteries along the roads, not in the town.
Repair the public buildings of the city before beginning new ones; and pull down the booths, sheds and houses that private people build into the public porticoes or against the walls of public buildings.
Size the forum to the population, neither cramped nor deserted, and make its breadth two-thirds of its length, so that the oblong suits the shows held in it.
breadth : length = 2 : 3
Put the temples of the city’s protecting gods (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva) on the highest ground; Mercury in the forum; Apollo and Bacchus by the theatre; Hercules by the circus; Mars and Venus outside the walls.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Streets turned away from the winds”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/vitruvius-winds. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.