The architect has the surface of the ground with which to start. This gives him a horizontal line as the base of his building. He considers it of major importance in his design. We find him crossing the front of his building with horizontal moulding or long bands of colored brick, paralleling the base line and otherwise interestingly dividing the vertical face of the front and sides. His guide is the bottom line of his primary mass or the line of the ground which binds the different parts of the building into a single unit. It can be readily seen that if he shifted the position of his mouldings up or down with the freedom of the landscape architect in locating his roads, he would not be planning his horizontal divisions in sympathy with the structural requirements of his primary mass.
These horizontal divisions or lines have a tendency to give apparent added length to an object. Thus by their judicious use a designer may make a building or room look longer than it really is.
Let us now turn to the simpler objects with which we may be more directly concerned. The piano bench has horizontal lines crossing it, giving an effect quite similar to that of horizontal mouldings crossing a building. There may also be ornamental inlaid lines crossing the bench and intended to beautify the design, but it is to be remembered that at present we are considering the structural divisions only.
Designing Objects with Horizontal Divisions
[Plate 6] represents a concrete example of the methods to be used in designing the horizontal divisions of a piano bench. The steps may be divided as follows:
(a) The height of a piano bench may be determined either from measurement of a similar bench or from one of the books on furniture design now on the market. The scale of one inch or one and one-half inches to the foot may be adopted. Two horizontal lines should be drawn, one for the bottom and one for the top of the bench. The distance between these lines we will arbitrarily fix at twenty inches.
Plate 7
(b) Many objects are designed within rectangles which enclose their main or over-all proportions. With this in view, and keeping in mind the width of the bench necessary to the accommodation of two players and the requirements of a well proportioned primary mass (Rule 1b), the lines are now drawn completing the rectangular boundaries of the primary mass. The limitations of service and the restrictions of good designing give the width of the primary mass so designed as three feet and two inches, with a ratio of height to length of five to eight and one-half. It is simpler to design first the most prominent face of the object to be followed by other views later in the designing process.