Before The Architect - High Classical Home Design Rules of Order

Design Proportion

BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – HOME DESIGNING BACKGROUND – CUSTOM HOME DESIGN ARTICLES

HIGH CLASSICAL ORDER RULES - HARMONY IN HOME DESIGN

BEWARE: THIS SUBJECT CAN PULL YOU IN ALL THE WAY, LIKE JULIAN BEEVER'S WHALE OF A FISH

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Before The Architect suggests that there’s a place in home design for old-to-ancient to high classical (well known and celebrated, standard and authoritative) Western notions of unity, harmony, order, proportion - classicism. Noteworthy, virtually all of these means and motives in building design have been addressed in the literature and elsewhere principally to public or very large private structures – coliseums, churches, huge bank buildings, and the like. Before The Architect’s begun applying some very old ideas of home design to some very new homes with success and surprises.

This article is meant as a reference tool box for designing-in rules of order in high classical harmony, preferring to deal with how-to down time’s road a-ways.

There’s a lot of reading on home design proportion and Classical home design. Most of it’s not especially interesting – clinical mathematics, nautilus shells and phyllotaxis, irrelevance borne of style, size, etc. In Before The Architect’s opinion, these works are some of the better:

The heady, heavy-going: Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism by Rudolf Wittkower, W. W. Norton & Company, 1971.
The intellectually entertaining and well-written The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio, Broadway Books, 2002.
The commanding presentation of the Orders, their making and remaking in The Classical Language of Architecture by John Summerson, The MIT Press, 1962.
Of methods and materials, Traditional Construction Patterns: Design & Detail Rules Of Thumb by Stephen Mouzon et al., McGraw-Hill. 2005.
The thoughtful, The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic (And How to Get It Back) by Jonathan Hale, Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
The overarching [but hardly not over-reaching], A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction by C. Alexander et al., Oxford University Press, 1977 and its companion The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, 1979.

As to proportion and proportions alone, here are those presently favored by Before The Architect, mostly for their simplicity:

Golden Mean, or Golden Section or Golden Ratio, or Mark Barr’s Ratio of Pheidias (a/k/a Phidias) & Ф, or phi
Lambda in Plato’s Timaeus plus 5 & 7.
Regulating lines (ou tracés regulateurs à la Auguste Choisy et Le Corbusier)
Subjectively – balance, rhythm, symmetry, a sense of schema from illusive to hard rock.

For perspective, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Sidelight on Relativity by A. Einstein, translated by G. B. Jeffery and W. Perret, London, 1922.

The practical use of these metrics so far for Before The Architect mostly relates - a) positive integers from 1-9 exclusively, b) plus Phi and phi, c) generally apparent and usually symmetrical lines of relationship.

Forming home design in a framework of proportion, Before The Architect finds that –

	It’s way easier to begin home drawing with proportion in mind as a home design premise than to attempt its imposition later on.
	Complexity can overcome order or at least leave the practical realm when proportions proliferate beyond the 9 chosen integers and the 2 chosen irrationals, a/k/a while rigorous in harmonious home design does not mean slavish, it also does not mean sloppy or obtuse.
	Getting obsessive with this stuff can make you crazier. Enjoy.
	There is a tendency to momentum, a propensity herewith in that proportional opportunities can present themselves sui generis with proportional precedent.
	There arise practical limits particularly on interiors whereat function can rule.
	There is no escaping a community’s inattention to these matters when a client demands the project must necessarily conform to sometimes hideous home design choice points in keeping up with the Joneses, e.g., outsized windows, cascades of gables, unbalanced segments, predetermined clad and trim, etc. [a point which is mirrored in client or community insistence in ignorant or insensitive departure from well-expressed style], a/k/a give it up, the horse won’t drink; you hauled the water.
	Whimsy accounts well now and then. So does artful, or creative; a little divergence is a good thing.
	Don't ever be telling yourself that those who have gone before you were slacking in home design efforts of pattern. Your barren ignorance would be showing. Even jobsite tradesmen not all that long before your time were steeped in knowledge of sacred geometry and Classical style [would that you are doubtful, sit down sometime with the photographed front elevation of a fine example of some well-know home design style of, say, the late 19th century, and layout that elevation using a basic knowledge of harmonious home design and the parts fit over and over and over again], those home designers and home builders being at the tail end of millennia of practice, practice, practice and respect, respect, respect for the craft.

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