Get Your House Right
Massing from the roof plan down
Marianne Cusato has written a marvelous book, Get Your House Right, that outlines and illustrates many of the things builders get wrong in trying to create architecturally distinctive homes. Builders seem to have forgotten the vocabulary and rules of thumb that ensured all the elements work together to create an elegant, coherent whole. In this and future articles, we will excerpt some of her ideas.
The first step in designing a building is to determine the massing: the way its volumes are put together. Simple forms are easier to understand, a house with a complicated massing that generates endless hips and gables will lack focus and have a confused hierarchy. The best details in the world cannot save a building that has lost control of its form.
To start, determine the primary mass of the building. At its simplest, a traditional house is often a square or rectangular box. Don't let the secondary masses get larger than the primary volume of the building.
The massing of a building is determined in the first stages of design, while the floor plans are being resolved. The fatal flaw of the McMansion is that the floor plan is usually a jumbled combination of rooms - with little or no thought given to the roof plan above. These complicated forms become a framer's nightmare, but still worse, from the point of view of the streetscape, they are an aesthetic mess.
A helpful design strategy is to work back and forth between the floor plan and the roof plan. As rooms are added, make sure that the combination of spaces can be easily resolved under one roof.
Reprinted with permission. Get Your House Right. On The Level, Volume 14, Issue 6, June, 2009
Previous Articles:
