Urban Design Guide - Section 2 Enhance and ... - Islington Council

2.3 ELEVATIONAL TREATMENT
Victorian and Georgian architects used symmetry,
proportions and hierarchy to create a vertical
window grouping.
Contemporary buildings are usually characterised by
lower floor to ceiling heights with little or no
variation between each floor. This requires other
strategies to achieve vertical articulation such as
grouping windows into vertical bands.
Vertical Articulation (and addressing
lower floor-to-ceiling heights)
Articulating strategies should always be
employed to provide street frontages with
underlying order. The window arrangement is
an important element in breaking down the
scale of building frontages. For the reasons
stated in 2.2.6, this is usually best achieved
by emphasising the vertical proportions.
Vertical proportions can be achieved by:
• Designing the windows so that their
vertical axis is greater than the horizontal
and / or dividing each window into a series
of vertically proportioned glazing panels.
Horizontally proportioned windows
can sometimes be given more vertical
emphasis by incorporating vertically
proportioned glazing panels.
• Grouping windows into vertical bands
that allow the fenestration to be read as a
vertical grouping rather than a horizontal
one. For example, Georgian and Victorian
architects expressed individual terraced
houses by pairing windows or grouping
windows typically in a symmetrical
arrangement. This usually involved
employing geometric proportioning
devices and a hierarchy that defined and
differentiated each floor by the graduation
of the vertical height of the windows
within an implied vertical grouping. Later
Victorian and Edwardian buildings also
used other devices such as the projecting
bays and more elaborate decoration and
architraving.
Lower floor-to-ceiling heights of modern
houses can reduce the opportunity to
graduate windows in this way, and can
generate inappropriately squat or horizontally
proportioned buildings and windows.
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Islington Urban Design Guide December 2006