While the principle of procession is still primarily about space, it also pertains to time. The best houses speak to us in a visual language with which we are all familiar. A gate in a picket fence that opens onto a narrow path that leads through a yard to an open porch that covers a door is a set of symbols we recognize as signposts guiding us through increasingly private territory towards the threshold of someone’s clandestine world. Such "layering” (as it is often called) demarcates public space from semiprivate and private spaces. This serves to put us at ease, as it ensures that we will never be left to wonder if we have overstepped our boundaries as guests. Familiar symbols of domesticity, like the gable, can further comfort us by presenting the subconscious with the familiar language of home. A covered doorway that is clearly visible from the street not only lets us know where to enter a house, but indicates that we are welcome there. Generally, more private areas, like bedrooms and bathrooms, will be positioned towards the rear of a house and encountered only after more public realms, like the living room, have been passed.
Once inside a good dwelling, visual cues should leave us with no doubt that this is a home in the truest sense of the word. Some of the greatest residential designs employ the same formal geometry as that of sacred architecture. When we approach and enter a well-designed church or mosque, we immediately find ourselves straddling its vertical symmetry. As we follow the axis between our eye and the cross or qibla at the far end of the room, we remain at the building’s center. This procession alludes to the structure’s significance as a symbol of the cosmos of which we are the center. A well-designed little house will remind us just as effectively as any cathedral that we are not merely witnessing divine beauty, but that we are that beauty.
A strong procession is created in the home by using some variation of the same three elements that are universally used to create it in sacred architecture: a gate, a path and a focal point. Moreover, all seven of the principles that have been presented here for residential design are none other than the same used to design a good cathedral. Attention to simplicity, honesty, proportion, scale, alignment, hierarchy and procession can help to produce a composition in which we participate as an indispensable component. So long as the prescriptions for good design are followed, even the tiniest hut will never seem twee or out of place. A well-composed, little house reflects the entire universe as no ordinary mansion can.
Third Street Cottages in Langley, WA
ЖД HARTLEY
