Hidden Orders

You're looking at a building façade and it looks 'right' but you can't say why. Every building has proportional structure — base, middle, top — that maps to the classical orders even when there's no column in sight. This configurator lets you drag the proportions of the five orders and see how pedestal height, column diameter, and entablature depth create the ratios that trained your eye without you knowing it. Use it to understand why some façades feel balanced and others don't.

Toggle elements on and off to see what's load-bearing to the composition and what's decoration.

Purpose: reveals how classical facades are layered systems — remove elements and the proportional skeleton persists.

Presets

Elements

Bays: 5 Stories: 3

Next improvement: The likeliest next improvement is adding a façade overlay mode — paste your building elevation and adjust the order proportions on top of it to find the hidden classical structure.

Future: Modular Proportion Configurator — Le Corbusier's Modulor and Ken (Japanese module) systems applied to plan and section, showing how different cultures solved the same proportion problem.

Future: Façade Rhythm Generator — bay spacing, solid-to-void ratio, and repetition patterns for curtain wall and punched-opening façades, from compositional rules in Ching's “Architecture: Form, Space & Order.”