Identify the classical orders—the architectural styles developed by the Greeks and Romans used to this day.
Greek architectural orders. Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] Architecture is a language, and you know how when you learn a new vocabulary word you start to notice it for the first time everywhere? Well, the same thing happens with architecture. When you learn a new architectural form, you start to see it everywhere.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:18] That’s especially true of the classical orders, because these are what are essentially the building blocks of Western architecture and they’ve been used for about 2,500 years.
Dr. Zucker: [0:28] We’re basically talking about styles of architecture that the ancient Greeks had developed, mostly for their temples, and you’re right that we’ve continued to use.
Dr. Harris: [0:37] We’ve got several contemporary examples up along the top.
Dr. Zucker: [0:40] But what’s important to remember is that it’s just a fancy dressing, really, of a basic ancient building system.
Dr. Harris: [0:48] We’ve brought in Stonehenge to illustrate that ancient building system, called post-and-lintel architecture. This is the most fundamental, the most basic, oldest kind of architectural system. The posts are the vertical elements, and they support a horizontal element called a lintel.
Dr. Zucker: [1:08] You know what? We still use this basic system when we nail two-by-fours together, and that’s what the Greeks were doing, but they were doing it in a much more sophisticated way.
Dr. Harris: [1:17] Right, they developed decorative systems, and that’s what we’re referring to when we use the term “classical orders.” There are three basic orders — the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. There’s a couple extra, but we’re not going to go into those today but we’ve listed them here for you just so you know what they are — the Tuscan and the Composite.
[1:35] The Doric and Ionic and Corinthian are illustrated here in this diagram. First the Doric, then the Ionic, and then the last two are Corinthian. These are just slight variations of these three orders.
Dr. Zucker: [1:48] The Doric is really the most simple, the Ionic, a little bit more complicated, and then the Corinthian, completely out of control.
Dr. Harris: [1:56] Let’s start with the oldest order, the Doric order.
Dr. Zucker: [1:58] Right. We think that this order began in the 7th century [B.C.E.] on the mainland in Greece, and we’re looking at an actual Greek temple that happens to be in Italy. Nevertheless, it’s just a great example of the Doric in the Classical era.
Dr. Harris: [2:13] Let’s start at the top, with the pediment. The pediment isn’t officially part of the order, but since Greek temples had at one end or the other a pediment, we just thought we would name that for you and that’s that triangular space at the very top of the temple.
Dr. Zucker: [2:29] These are gabled roofs. Sometimes they would be filled with sculpture.
Dr. Harris: [2:33] The next area below the pediment is actually officially part of the order, and that’s called the entablature.
Dr. Zucker: [2:40] That would be the area from about here to here.
Dr. Harris: [2:44] The top part of the entablature is called the frieze.
Dr. Zucker: [2:48] Only this part right here is known as the frieze. In other words, this whole section.
Dr. Harris: [2:54] Right. In the Doric order, it is decorated in a very specific way, using triglyphs and metopes.
Dr. Zucker: [3:01] Actually, if you look at the word “triglyph,” you notice that the prefix is “tri,” just like “tricycle,” it means “three.” The suffix, “glyph,” means “mark.” A triglyph literally means “three marks.” You can see patterns of three marks moving all the way across the frieze.
Dr. Harris: [3:19] In between the triglyphs are spaces that are called metopes. In ancient Greek architecture, these were often filled with sculpture.
Dr. Zucker: [3:27] The triglyphs we don’t think are just arbitrary. They probably came from a time when temples were built out of wood. These would have been the ends of planks that would have functioned as beams in the temple. They would have, of course, been supported directly over the columns. You’ll notice that every other one, at least, is aligned directly over the columns.
Dr. Harris: [3:48] As we move down the temple, the next area we come to is the capital.
Dr. Zucker: [3:54] This is a Doric capital. It’s very simple. It’s got a flare. Then it’s got a simple slab on top.
Dr. Harris: [4:01] The Doric is the oldest, the most severe, and was associated, according to the ancient Roman architectural historian Vitruvius, with masculine form.
Dr. Zucker: [4:12] It is broad. It’s not tall. It feels heavy.
Dr. Harris: [4:17] It does. As we continue to move down, we come to the area that we commonly call the column, but art historians call the shaft.
Dr. Zucker: [4:25] If you look closely, you can see that it is not entirely plain. There are actually vertical lines that move across the entire surface, known as flutes. In the Doric, a flute is very shallow. What it is is it’s a kind of scallop that’s been carved out of the surface.
Dr. Harris: [4:41] What fluting does is it creates a nice vertical decorative pattern along the shaft.
Dr. Zucker: [4:47] One of the other defining features of the Doric order is that at the bottom of the shaft there is no decorative foot. The shaft of the column goes straight into the floor of the temple.
Dr. Harris: [4:59] You can see that really well in the detail on the lower right, where there’s no molding there to make a transition. Let’s have a look at what these look like in person.
Dr. Zucker: [5:11] Capitals are up high, so we would never see a person next to them. It’s easy to not realize just how big they are. I snapped this terrific picture of you at the British Museum next to a capital that actually comes from the most famous Doric temple, on the Acropolis in Athens.
Dr. Harris: [5:28] The Parthenon. They are massive. This photo is good also for seeing — in this case a reconstruction — but giving you a sense of the entablature with that frieze with triglyphs and metopes. We’ve got an example on the right of a relief sculpture that was for one of the metopes on the Parthenon.
Dr. Zucker: [5:49] Right, so this metope here would have actually fit right in one of these squares.
Dr. Harris: [5:53] Let’s talk about one last element that we find in Doric architecture. That’s something called entasis.
Dr. Zucker: [5:59] This is a little tricky, because I think most people assume that a column is straight up and down. That is, the sides of a column are parallel with each other, and the base of a column is just as wide as the area directly below the capital. But in fact, the ancient Greeks didn’t build their temples that way.
Dr. Harris: [6:18] No. It’s fascinating to think about all the ways that the ancient Greeks are thinking about how to make their buildings beautiful and speak of the realm of the gods. And so when we look at an ancient Doric temple, we see that the shafts swell a little bit toward the center.
Dr. Zucker: [6:36] So right about a third of the way down, they would be at their widest. It would taper ever so slightly towards the bottom and taper much more so as we move up to the top, so that the narrowest point of the column shaft would be right at the top, and the widest part would be about a third of the way from the base.
Dr. Harris: [6:59] And so the building has a sense of liveliness that it wouldn’t have if the column was exactly the same width at the top as at the bottom.
Dr. Zucker: [7:08] Architectural historians have debated why the Greeks bothered to do this, because this was expensive. This was difficult. It meant that every drum that makes up this column had to be an individual, unique piece. These could not be mass measured and mass produced.
Dr. Harris: [7:25] You just used the word “drum.” The columns are not actually carved from one piece of stone.
Dr. Zucker: [7:30] If you look very carefully at this photograph, you can just make out the seams between those drums. There would also have generally been a hole that would have gone through the center of each of these pieces so that a piece of wood sometimes would actually string them together, almost like beads on a necklace.
[7:47] One of the other things that entasis does is to emphasize the verticality of the temple, because they get narrower as they go further up. It seems as if the shaft of the column might actually be taller than it really is, because of course as things move away from us, they get smaller in scale.
Dr. Harris: [8:06] The Greeks are thinking about human perception. They’re thinking about how we see, not just the abstract idea of math and geometry, but actually human experience, which says something about ancient Greek culture.
Dr. Zucker: [8:18] One last detail, the entasis gives the shaft of the column a sense of almost elasticity, that it is bearing the weight of the stone above it.
Dr. Harris: [8:27] It’s fascinating to think about all of these decisions that the Greeks are making as they build. Let’s look at the Ionic order, which emerges shortly after the Doric order. Here’s another building on the Acropolis. This is the Erechtheion.
Dr. Zucker: [8:41] This is such a different aesthetic. There’s such a sense of delicacy here. There is not that sense of mass, that sense of the muscularity of the buildings, that we associate with the Doric.
Dr. Harris: [8:52] In fact Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architectural historian, saw this as a more feminine order. It’s taller. It’s thinner.
Dr. Zucker: [9:00] Now, one of the columns from this building in Greece is in the museum in London. We have some good photographs of it.
Dr. Harris: [9:07] You can see the distinguishing feature is at the top, at the capital, where we see these scroll-like shapes, also known as volutes. We also see a slightly different type of fluting. We also, importantly, see a base.
[9:23] Let’s move to the Corinthian order. This looks really different and is the most decorative. The distinguishing feature here is again the capital, where we see leaf-like shapes.
Dr. Zucker: [9:35] They also have bases. They tend to be taller than the Doric just like the Ionic, but they are highly decorative. There’s a great myth about the origin of the Corinthian capital.
Dr. Harris: [9:46] It’s a kind of fun story. Of course, we have no idea whether this is true. The story is that there was a young girl who died, and her possessions were placed in a basket and put on top of her grave. Underneath that basket was a acanthus plant that began to grow, and because the heavy basket with a tile on top was on top, the acanthus leaves grew out to the side.
Dr. Zucker: [10:08] If we look at a Corinthian column, it really does look like that.
Dr. Harris: [10:11] It looks exactly like that.
Dr. Zucker: [10:13] It’s a great myth whether or not it’s true. The Corinthian order is the most complex. It includes both the scroll that we would expect to see in the Ionic…
Dr. Harris: [10:22] The volutes.
Dr. Zucker: [10:23] Right. But also these very complex leaf-like forms, which you can just make out here, which is actually from the acanthus leaf. We have a photograph of an acanthus leaf right down here.
Dr. Harris: [10:33] These grow wild, so it makes sense.
Dr. Zucker: [10:35] What’s important to remember is that the ancient Greeks, although they developed these three classical orders, were just the genesis. The Romans took these ideas over.
[10:46] Then subsequently, people who’ve looked back to the Classical tradition have borrowed from them yet again. We still do this today.
[10:54] There you have it, the Greek orders.
[10:56] [music]
An architectural order describes a style of building. In classical architecture, each order is readily identifiable by means of its proportions and profiles, as well as by various aesthetic details. The style of column employed serves as a useful index of the style itself, so identifying the order of the column will then, in turn, situate the order employed in the structure as a whole. The classical orders—described by the labels Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—do not merely serve as descriptors for the remains of ancient buildings, but as an index to the architectural and aesthetic development of Greek architecture itself.
Doric order (underlying image from Alfred D. Hamlin, College Histories of Art History of Architecture, 1915)
The Doric order
The Doric order is the earliest of the three Classical orders of architecture and represents an important moment in Mediterranean architecture when monumental construction made the transition from impermanent materials (i.e. wood) to permanent materials, namely stone. The Doric order is characterized by a plain, unadorned column capital and a column that rests directly on the stylobate of the temple without a base. The Doric entablature includes a frieze composed of triglyphs and metopes. The columns are fluted and are of sturdy, if not stocky, proportions.
Iktinos and Kallikrates, The Parthenon, 447–432 B.C.E., Athens (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Doric order emerged on the Greek mainland during the course of the late seventh century B.C.E. and remained the predominant order for Greek temple construction through the early fifth century B.C.E., although notable buildings of the Classical period—especially the canonical Parthenon in Athens—still employ it. By 575 B.C.E the order may be properly identified, with some of the earliest surviving elements being the metope plaques from the Temple of Apollo at Thermon. Other early, but fragmentary, examples include the sanctuary of Hera at Argos, votive capitals from the island of Aegina, as well as early Doric capitals that were a part of the Temple of Athena Pronaia at Delphi in central Greece. The Doric order finds perhaps its fullest expression in the Parthenon (c. 447–432 B.C.E.) at Athens designed by Iktinos and Kallikrates.
Ionic Capital, North Porch of the Erechtheion (Erechtheum), Acropolis, Athens, marble, 421–407 B.C.E. (British Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Ionic order (photo: Coyau, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Ionic order
As its name suggests, the Ionic Order originated in Ionia, a coastal region of central Anatolia (today Turkey) where a number of ancient Greek settlements were located. Volutes (scroll-like ornaments) characterize the Ionic capital and a base supports the column, unlike the Doric order. The Ionic order developed in Ionia during the mid-sixth century B.C.E. and had been transmitted to mainland Greece by the fifth century B.C.E. Among the earliest examples of the Ionic capital is the inscribed votive column from Naxos, dating to the end of the seventh century B.C.E.
The monumental temple dedicated to Hera on the island of Samos, built by the architect Rhoikos c. 570–560 B.C.E., was the first of the great Ionic buildings, although it was destroyed by earthquake in short order. The sixth century B.C.E. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a wonder of the ancient world, was also an Ionic design. In Athens, the Ionic order influences some elements of the Parthenon (447–432 B.C.E.), notably the Ionic frieze that encircles the cella of the temple. Ionic columns are also employed in the interior of the monumental gateway to the Acropolis known as the Propylaia (c. 437–432 B.C.E.). The Ionic was promoted to an exterior order in the construction of the Erechtheion (c. 421–405 B.C.E.) on the Athenian Acropolis.
East porch of the Erechtheion, 421–407 B.C.E., marble, Acropolis, Athens (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Ionic order is notable for its graceful proportions, giving a more slender and elegant profile than the Doric order. The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius compared the Doric module to a sturdy, male body, while the Ionic was possessed of more graceful, feminine proportions. The Ionic order incorporates a running frieze of continuous sculptural relief, as opposed to the Doric frieze composed of triglyphs and metopes.
The Greek Orders
The Corinthian order
The Corinthian order is both the latest and the most elaborate of the Classical orders of architecture. The order was employed in both Greek and Roman architecture, with minor variations, and gave rise, in turn, to the Composite order. As the name suggests, the origins of the order were connected in antiquity with the Greek city-state of Corinth where, according to the architectural writer Vitruvius, the sculptor Callimachus drew a set of acanthus leaves surrounding a votive basket (Vitr. 4.1.9–10). In archaeological terms, the earliest known Corinthian capital comes from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae and dates to c. 427 B.C.E.
Corinthian column capital 4th–3rd century B.C.E. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The defining element of the Corinthian order is its elaborate, carved capital, which incorporates even more vegetal elements than the Ionic order does. The stylized, carved leaves of an acanthus plant grow around the capital, generally terminating just below the abacus. The Romans favored the Corinthian order, perhaps due to its slender properties. The order is employed in numerous notable Roman architectural monuments, including the Temple of Mars Ultor and the Pantheon in Rome, and the Maison Carrée in Nîmes.
Acanthus leaf (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Legacy of the Greek architectural canon
The canonical Greek architectural orders have exerted influence on architects and their imaginations for thousands of years. While Greek architecture played a key role in inspiring the Romans, its legacy also stretches far beyond antiquity. When James “Athenian” Stuart and Nicholas Revett visited Greece during the period from 1748 to 1755 and subsequently published The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece (1762) in London, the Neoclassical revolution was underway. Captivated by Stuart and Revett’s measured drawings and engravings, Europe suddenly demanded Greek forms. Architects the likes of Robert Adam drove the Neoclassical movement, creating buildings like Kedleston Hall, an English country house in Kedleston, Derbyshire. Neoclassicism even jumped the Atlantic Ocean to North America, spreading the rich heritage of Classical architecture even further—and making the Greek architectural orders not only extremely influential, but eternal.