You build one good house. You need eleven more. You copy it, and the result looks exactly like what it is – a village assembled by someone who built one thing and used it twelve times.
Repetition is not the problem. Villages, terraces and city blocks in the real world are heavily repetitive and read as places rather than copies. The difference is in what gets repeated and what gets varied, and that split is learnable.
Separate the module from the instance
The unit you repeat should be smaller than a building. A whole house copied twelve times is twelve copies. A wall system, a roof pitch and a window type, recombined twelve ways, is a street.
So the first move is to stop thinking of your good house as the module. Break it into parts:
- Wall construction – materials, thickness, how corners are handled.
- Roof pitch and material.
- Window type and proportion.
- Foundation and plinth treatment.
- Door and threshold detail.
Those five stay constant across the whole settlement. Everything else varies.
What to vary, in order of effect
Footprint. The largest lever. Change the plan shape – an L, a rectangle, a square with a projecting wing – and two buildings using identical materials read as different buildings. This costs nothing and does more than any detail work.
Height. One storey, two, two with an attic. Varying height also varies the roofline, which is the thing you see from a distance.
Orientation. Rotate. A building turned ninety degrees presents a different face to the street even if it is otherwise identical to its neighbour.
Age. One building with moss and cracked blocks, another clean. Settlements are not built in one year and the ones that read best do not look like they were.
The 70-20-10 split
A workable ratio for a settlement of ten or more buildings.
70 percent are straightforward instances of the module – varied in footprint and height, nothing unusual. These are the background and they should be quick to build.
20 percent are elaborated: an extra wing, a balcony, a different roof shape, a larger window. They break the rhythm without breaking the language.
10 percent are exceptions – the building that is obviously not a house. A tower, a hall, a workshop with a chimney. These are what the eye lands on, and they are what makes the other ninety percent read as context rather than filler.
Getting this backwards is the common failure. A settlement where every building is elaborated has no hierarchy, and nothing stands out because everything does.
Space between buildings does most of the work
Identical buildings at identical spacing along a straight line look copied. The same buildings at irregular spacing along a curved path look like a village.
Three things to vary: the gap between buildings, the setback from the path, and the angle relative to the path. None of these touch the buildings at all.
What fills those gaps matters as much – a well, a cart, a fence, a tree, a patch of crops. The negative space is where a settlement stops being an arrangement of houses. The path itself is the spine of all of it, and how you draw that path decides the shape of everything placed along it.
Build the module properly first
Everything above assumes the repeated unit is good. It has to be, because any weakness in it is about to appear ten times.
Spend the time on the first building. Get the wall depth, the window recessing and the roof right, then stop refining and start repeating. The instinct to keep improving the prototype is what turns a settlement into one very good house and nine unfinished ones.
A useful discipline: build the first one, then build the second one from memory rather than by copying. What you forget was not load-bearing, and what you reproduce without thinking is the actual module.
Terrain is a free variation source
A settlement on flat ground has to generate all its variety internally. A settlement on a slope gets variety from the ground – some buildings sit on plinths, some are cut into the hill, some have entrances at different levels.
That is one of the strongest arguments for not flattening a site. The terrain does work you would otherwise have to invent, and the techniques for using it are in building on slopes.
A checklist before you copy anything
- Is the module five decisions rather than one finished building?
- Do you have at least three footprint shapes and two heights?
- Is there one building that is obviously not a house?
- Is the spacing irregular and the path not straight?
- Is something in the gaps between buildings?
Five yeses produce a settlement. Three or fewer produce a row of copies, and no amount of detail work on the individual buildings will fix it.
Images: MES – Moog’s End Structures project gallery.