A-level: Classical orders of architecture explained

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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.

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