Han Vandevyvere undertakes an investigation into some geometrical schemes that can be supposed to underlie the plans and facades of a number of Flemish Gothic town halls, all of them built from the late fourteenth till the early sixteenth century. To govern his study he founded a set of basic ordering rules: a search for simple series of integer numbers, so as to obtain simple ratios between the dimensions; a check to see that what is found to set up a plan is also found in the elevations; the preferential use of geometrical constructions that can easily be constructed with the compass and the carpenter’s square; checking the design in the measurement units that were in use at the moment and place of construction; a check for the use of construction based on a circle, its inscribed square and equilateral triangle.
